[upbeat instrumental music]
>> All right, well, wasn't
that plenary session great?
And I tell people that apologetics
is a lot more than just knowing answers.
It's knowing how to share
the truth in such a way
that people come to
Christ and grow in Christ
and their lives are transformed
by the truth of Christ.
So, this evening's session
is titled Punching Holes
in Recent Atheistic Arguments.
I did not come up with that title.
I'm not that gifted.
But I was talking with
Bill Craig about this,
and I was a little bit
frustrated about how atheists
tend to stop Christians
in their tracks sometimes
with stupid things, you know.
I thought about calling this
session Stupid Atheist Tricks.
[audience laughs]
And going down like 10, nine,
and counting down the list.
And I certainly did not mean,
but I thought about that title
and it was unclear.
People might think I was saying
that atheists are stupid.
I don't think atheists are stupid.
So, I said, that's not gonna work.
And as I got into thinking
about it, what I wanted,
originally, it was intending
to do was just to go through
some common sayings that they say
or arguments that they make
and show how they fail.
And I came to the conclusion
that really, what we needed
to do before that was take a
step back and do some analysis
about how atheists, and
particularly the new atheists
or contemporary atheists, are thinking,
and the popular atheists
like Richard Dawkins
and Daniel Dennett and
Christopher Hitchens
and Sam Harris, and also
Stephen Hawking who,
while we might not say he's a new atheist,
he is a contemporary atheist.
And so what I would like to do is begin
with an analysis of their core
beliefs and their practices,
and kind of help you get your
head around how they think
and where they come from,
and then deal with two
or three major arguments
or lines of arguments that
we see from the new atheists.
Core belief number one would
be that science and religion
are mutually exclusive
ways of looking at life,
that you can have science
or you can have religion,
they're both ways to look at life,
but you can't blend them together.
They're mutually exclusive,
and there's a dichotomous
relation between them.
This view depends upon two modern myths.
The first one is what I call
the God of the gaps myth,
and the second, the
science-religion warfare myth.
The God of the gaps mythology is,
the basic idea behind it is that
before the development of modern science,
people believed in God because
of what they did not know.
They believed in God on
the basis of ignorance.
They didn't understand
nature and natural phenomena,
and you often hear people say things like,
ancient people thought that thunder
was Thor pounding his
hammer and such things,
and so, they had a mythical,
religious explanation
for natural phenomena
that we understand now
and have understood, most
of us, for quite some time,
at least in some elementary way.
Well, many of these
statements could be true,
but they would also be
isolated examples of truth.
Certainly, that's not the way
that all religions came to be.
Certainly, it's not the way
that revealed religions came
to be, and anyone who thought
about it anthropologically,
anthropology was my related
field in my doctoral days,
would pretty quickly realize
that these explanations
are not sufficient, that
the rise of religion,
the prevalence of religion,
calls for a much more
sophisticated explanation of that.
They would see that
it's simply simplistic.
I had, I had drinks with a leading
agnostic New Testament scholar.
I won't mention his name.
I've done one book with him
and hope to do another one.
I say we had drinks.
He had, he had beer and
wine; I had iced tea.
[audience laughs]
But I mixed the pink and the blue,
and so when you're a
Southern Baptist professor,
that's a mixed drink.
[audience laughs]
But he was telling me that he
had been with Richard Dawkins
the night before, and
that they were going to do
a series of speaking engagements,
and he said, but you know,
Dawkins really doesn't
understand religious people.
He doesn't understand
Christian people in particular.
And we would see this
would be illustrative
of the fact that, of the
God of the gaps explanation
of how religion comes to
be simply if we thought,
if they don't understand
contemporary religious people,
they probably are not going to understand
ancient religious people
any better as well.
Now, let me mention one thing.
When I say the God of the gaps,
I'm talking about a God
of the gaps mythology.
I think it's perfectly capable
for contemporary people
wrongly to attribute things to God.
I've heard Christians
do that, where they say,
well, what else could it be?
And I say, I can think of a
number of things that this
explanation, phenomenon X
or phenomenon Y could be.
I don't think that we
Christians ought to suspend
our rationality simply
in the name of piety.
I'm against easy believism.
I'm against thoughtless Christianity
as much as I'm against anti-Christianity.
But the other myth is the science
and religion warfare mythology.
Science and religion are not at war.
Certainly science and
Christianity are not at war.
Some of the greatest,
most of the greatest names
in the history of science are Christians.
If you took the Christians
out of the history of science,
it would be a much shorter history,
and we would have a lot
less science without them.
In fact, the Christian view of the world
that God is a rational
being who has created
an orderly world that can
be understood by people
made in his image is
foundational to the roots
and the history of contemporary science.
But often, you'll hear
people talk about Galileo
or the Scopes trial and not
put the whole story in context.
Sometimes, they don't know the story,
because they've accepted the myth,
and they're genuinely passing
it on as they think it is,
but many times, they just get it wrong.
For instance, Galileo was never tortured.
His life was never threatened.
He was sentenced to home arrest.
The main reason he went on
trial was because he wrote
a fictitious work in which
he offended the pope,
who had been one of his biggest supporters
up until that time, but even
after he was placed on house
arrest, he continued to live
a fairly luxurious lifestyle
and continue on his work.
Moreover, Galileo's theory
was not entirely correct.
He was correct that the
sun moved around the earth,
but he thought that the sun did not move,
and yet the sun does, science,
modern scientists know.
In fact, I've got a quotation here from,
from an agnostic scholar
in the history of science
and philosopher Ronald Numbers.
He says this.
"There's a powerful mythology today
"suggesting that science
and religion are enemies,
"and it is fueled by some of
the most public and popular
"scientists such as the late Carl Sagan
"in the United States, or Richard Dawkins
"in Great Britain who
have gone out of their way
"on occasions to present that view."
And so we see that there,
there are some powerful myths
working behind contemporary atheism.
The second core belief is
that faith is a superstitious
blind leap based on
the denial of evidence.
So they understand faith
in a particular way.
Richard Dawkins said this.
He said, "Faith is the great cop out,
"the great excuse to
evade the need to think
"and evaluate evidence.
"Faith is belief in spite
of, even perhaps because of,
"the lack of evidence."
Christopher Hitchens said this.
"What can be asserted without proof
"can be dismissed without proof."
Now, it's a little unclear
what Hitchens means by proof,
but in context, what I think he means
is that we don't have reasons
to support our beliefs.
And I think I don't know
any serious Christian
who thinks that's a good
definition of faith or that's
the reason that Christians
believe what they believe.
And then third, religion
is inherently evil.
It poisons everything it
touches, and of course,
Christopher Hitchens has
entitled his bestselling book
God is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons
Everything That It
Touches, or consider this,
the Nobel prize-winning
scientist Steven Weinberg.
He says this.
"With or without religion,
you would have good people
"doing good things and evil
people doing evil things,
"but for good people to do evil things,
"that takes religion."
Theoretical physicist
Freeman Dyson responded
to this statement in his New
York Review of Books article
by saying, "And for bad
people to do good things,
"that also takes religion."
[audience laughs]
Frequently, atheists
will point to the fact
that at least some secular
nations seemingly have less crime
than the more religious nations do.
Essentially, their argument boils down
to saying that secular people
are better citizens than
religious people are.
But is this true?
We frequently will hear
offhand stories or personal
narratives or statements
like, well, everybody knows,
and they'll talk about
things like the Crusades
without going into the history and context
of the Crusades and life back
then and so forth and so on.
But is it true?
Well, let's consider what we
can thank Christian people for.
We can thank them for at least
three things in our context.
Number one would be hospitals,
number two, education,
and number three, democracy.
Let's look at some statistics here.
In America, as of 1999,
13% of all hospitals
were religious hospitals.
That's totaling 18% of all hospital beds.
That's 604 out of 4500-plus hospitals.
Now, some might say, well, that's,
that's not really very many.
You know, it's less than
20% for all the money that,
that goes into religion and
so forth, but consider this.
Public hospitals are not
quote-unquote secular hospitals.
They're paid for by taxes, and religious
people pay taxes just
like non-religious people.
In fact, the fact that
there are more people
who are religious than non-religious means
that religious people
pay most of the taxes
that pay for all of the public hospitals,
and then over and above paying for most
of the public hospitals, they go ahead
and pay for the private
hospitals on top of that.
Or education.
Consider this.
The Sorbonne, Oxford,
Cambridge, St. Andrews
were all begun by
Christians, as were Harvard,
Yale, and Princeton.
All but two of the first 108
American universities were
Christian universities.
But what does the hard data
tell us about citizenship?
Well, it's interesting that we have
some really good data that's contemporary.
In 2000, they began the Social
Capital Community Benchmark
Survey sponsored by three
dozen community foundations:
the Roper Center for
Public Opinion Research,
The Saguaro Seminar of the John F. Kennedy
School of Government
at Harvard University,
and this was the largest
survey ever of Americans
about civic engagement.
And the purpose of the, of this survey,
which is a huge survey,
lots and lots of data,
was to find out how well
we related to each other,
worked with each other,
contributed to make
each other's lives better, how
well we lived in community.
And this was, the data was
summarized by Syracuse University
professor Arthur Brooks in an article
Religious Faith and Charitable Giving
published in the journal Policy Review,
which is published by
the, by the 700 Club.
No, it's not.
It's published by the Hoover Institution
on War, Revolution, and
Peace at Stanford University.
So, these are not flaming
fundamentalist Christian groups
cooking the books, okay?
And Brooks divided the
respondents into three groups.
The 33% who said they attended
religious services every week
or more often, he designated as religious.
The 26% who reported
attending religious services
less than a few times per
year or explicitly saying
they had no religion, he
designated as secular,
which I think really is
giving a little bit too much
to the secular definition,
but nevertheless,
they weren't Billy Graham's
or the Pope's best men.
Those who practice their
religion occasionally
made up the remaining 41%.
And what he found was
religious people are 25
percentage points more
likely than secular people
to donate money, 91% to 66%;
23 points more likely to
volunteer time, 67% to 44%.
In real dollars, this
translates into an average
annual giving of $2,010 per
person among the religious
as opposed to 642 among the secular.
Religious people volunteer an
average of 12 times per year,
as opposed to an average of 5.8 times
per year for secular people.
Religious people make up
33% of the population,
as Brooks is charting it.
It's higher than that overall, I believe,
but he's not counting
all the religious people.
So these are the truly faithful religious,
33% of the population, but
they're responsible for 52%
of the money donated and
45% of the time volunteered.
Secular people make up
26% of the population,
but contribute only 13% of the money
and 17% of the time volunteered.
Lest anyone think that
all the time and money
given by religious people
is given to and through
religious institutions,
the study relates to giving
to non-religious charities as well.
Religious people are 10
points more likely to give
to non-religious causes
than are secular people,
and 21 points more likely to volunteer
for non-religious causes
than secular people.
So they're giving to their
churches and their synagogues
and their houses of faith
and those ministries,
and giving above and beyond that.
But what about this idea
that religious people
are violent, crazed,
genocidal mass murderers?
R. J. Rummel, Professor
Emeritus of political science
at the University of
Hawaii, he also taught
at Yale University and Indiana University,
not exactly Christian
hotbeds, he's done more work
in this area than probably anyone living.
He's rumored to be a
Nobel Peace Prize nominee,
but nobody but a very
select few actually know
who are nominated and don't win.
For nearly 50 years,
he focused his research
on the causes and conditions
of collective violence
and war with a view towards
helping their resolution
or elimination, and he
published his magnum opus,
five-volume Understanding
Conflict and War.
And you can see all of this information
at the website below.
And I will send this
PowerPoint to any of you
who emails me and asks me for it.
I'll be happy to send it to you,
or I may put it up on the web
and just let you download it.
Here's what he said about years and years
of studying genocide.
Democide is a term that he created
to be wider than genocide.
Genocide has to be with
a particular ethnic group
or a particular religious group.
He studied just mass
murder across the board,
and so he came up with this democide term.
And he says collecting data
on democide was a horrendous task.
I was soon overwhelmed by the
unbelievable repetitiveness
of regime after regime, ruler after ruler,
murdering people under
their control or rule
by shooting, burial, burial
alive, burning, hanging,
knifing, starvation,
flame, beating, torture,
and so on and on, year after year,
not hundreds, not thousands,
not tens of thousands
of these people, but
millions and millions,
almost 170 million of them.
And this is only what appears
a reasonable middle estimate.
The awful toll may even
reach about 300 million,
the equivalent in dead
of a nuclear war stretched
out over decades.
Here's what he found.
Three percent of pre-20th century democide
was primarily motivated
by religious beliefs.
Less than two percent
of 20th century democide
was primarily motivated
by religious beliefs.
What motivates democide?
The desire for power.
What is the solution?
His answer, democracy.
How is freedom grounded?
We hold these truths to be self evident,
that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their creator
with certain unalienable
rights, that among these
are life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness.
Or, in the words of Saint Nietzsche,
"Another Christian concept, no less crazy,
"has passed even more deeply
into the tissue of modernity,
"the concept of the equality
of souls before God.
"This concept furnishes the prototype
"of all theories of equal rights.
"Mankind was first taught
to stammer the proposition
"of equality in a religious context,
"and only later was it
made into morality."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power.
You have to understand,
in Nietzsche's twisted
mind, that's a bad thing.
But for sane people, it's a good thing.
So, let's look at the
characteristic practices.
Beyond their core beliefs
that science and religion
are mutually exclusive,
that faith is simply
a superstitious leap of blind faith
without evidence, without
support, and that religion
is inherently evil, what
are their practices?
Number one, anti-religious rhetoric.
I realized just how true this was
when I wrote an article
for a book that Paul Copan
and Jeremy Evans and Heath
Thomas have recently edited
for InterVarsity Press,
and I was asked to,
to write an article on their arguments
from Old Testament holy war for atheism.
So I read their books, and
I didn't find any arguments
as a philosopher would
recognize an argument.
Now, let me be clear what I'm saying.
I found a lot of Bible bashing.
I found a lot of inflammatory statements.
I found a lot of horrendous
truthful statements,
some of them.
I think we do have, as
Christians, to say, you know,
we have a fair amount
of sin in our own lives,
but you know, Christianity,
the Bible tells us, we're going to.
You know, one way to disprove
the Christian worldview
would be if we all became sinless,
because the scripture
says we're not going to
this side of heaven.
So, I found, but what I found
when I didn't find arguments
was I found a lot of rhetoric.
You know, there are three
ways to persuade people.
One way is evidence.
Another way is argument.
And by argument, I don't
mean getting red in the face
and raising your voice.
I mean putting sentences
together to form a coherent,
valid argument that, that
leads to a conclusion
that is rational to belief,
and the other is rhetoric.
Rhetoric can be good
or rhetoric can be bad.
Rhetoric can be based
on evidence and reason,
or rhetoric can simply be manipulative
and catch people off-guard.
I found something that looked
a whole lot like political rhetoric.
I teach logic, one of the jobs I do
at the seminary is teach logic,
and I love to teach logic
in an election year.
It's like the happy hunting
ground for informal fallacies.
[audience laughs]
You know, it really makes me concerned
when I look at the rhetoric
of the people we elect,
but that's what I found.
It was like preaching to the choir.
It was like the extremes
of the right and the left,
and I don't need to name names
or put faces with these sorts of people.
Secondly is superficial
knowledge of the Bible.
Interestingly enough,
every atheist I've ever met
has been quick to tell
me, I've read the Bible.
I know the Bible.
Most of the time, I don't believe them,
and it's not that I don't believe
they ever picked up a Bible.
It's not that I don't believe
they've ever read parts of the Bible.
They may have even read through
the Bible on a, you know,
a three chapter a day reading
plan, something like that.
But that's not knowing the Bible, okay?
Now, there are some atheists
that know the Bible,
and there are some agnostics
who know the Bible.
Bart Ehrman would be a very good example
of an agnostic that knows the Bible.
William Roe, a former Methodist preacher
who's now an atheist philosophy professor,
knows the Bible.
I'm not saying there aren't any out there,
but I'm saying a lot more people
say they've read the Bible than have.
As a matter of fact, a lot
more Christians say they've
read the Bible and know the
Bible than actually have.
So we don't have much to
hang our hat on there.
But I have an interesting example of this.
When Daniel Dennett was part
of the Greer-Heard Forum,
and I found Dennett to be a wonderful guy.
Interesting, brilliant,
easy to listen to, and he
found me to be a great guy.
And he really likes Southern Baptists.
He couldn't believe how
well we treated him.
I don't know what he thought we were,
you know, like we were all gonna line up
on the campus with guns when
he came in or something.
But he didn't realize that
Baptists believed in persuasion
but have died historically,
numerous Baptists have died
for the religious rights
of others with whom we disagree.
And so we're out at dinner
in five-star restaurant,
Emeril's in New Orleans.
Yeah, be jealous.
[audience laughs]
And he was complimenting
me on hos well it had gone,
and I said, well, you know, Dan,
I really am an evangelical Christian,
and I really would like everybody
to give their life to
Jesus Christ, even you.
And he went on this long
soliloquy about how he
was a Darwinist first
and an atheist second.
He says, I'm an atheist because I think
Darwinism leads to
atheism, that it undermines
the worldview, religious worldview,
and that's the point of his
book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
He said, but you know, there are a lot
of different theories
about Darwin, the man,
and I'm not into the quest
of the historical Darwin.
And he said, I don't care
about Darwin's personal life.
I just want people to
read The Origin of Species
and The Descent of Man,
read Darwin's thoughts.
They're brilliant, and everyone
would benefit from doing this.
And then he said, why can't you Christians
be that way with Jesus?
Not make him the issue.
Just, he had good things to
say, and read that stuff.
And I said, well, Dan, the
problem is is that Jesus
was the one who said I am the
way, the truth, and the life,
and no one comes to the Father but by me.
And it was like I'd
taken out a two-by-four
and gone, whop, right between the eyes.
And he just had this startled look.
And I had a moment there.
And then one of my colleagues
chimed in with yeah,
and besides that,
Christianity's not a religion.
It's a relationship.
Now, I understand what that trite truism
is getting at, that
there's something different
about the Christian religion
than other religions.
But when you look at
Christianity anthropologically,
it's a religion.
It walks like a duck,
it quacks like a duck,
it lays an egg like a
duck, it's a duck, okay?
And that just turned it off.
There was no moment there.
Brothers and sisters, we
can't be satisfied with trite,
superficial, one level
deep answers to deep,
involved human problems,
and we better not be guilty
of doing lazy, superficial apologetics.
But they have a superficial
knowledge of the Bible,
at least many of them.
They have a superficial
knowledge of theology.
Let's see what Richard
Dawkins says on this point.
He says this.
"I have yet to see any good
reason to suppose that theology
"as opposed to biblical
history, literature, et cetera,
"is a subject at all."
I would love to deal with that
for a longer period of time,
but I'm just going to leave
it out there as demonstration
that he really doesn't know
what he's talking about.
We see this very clearly
from the literary critic
Terry Eagleton in his response to Dawkins.
Now, Eagleton is certainly
not an evangelical Christian.
But he is a world-renown literary scholar.
He says this.
"Dawkins speaks scoffingly
of a personal God,
"as though it were entirely obvious
"exactly what this might mean.
"He seems to imagine God, if
not exactly with a white beard,
"then at least as some kind
of chap; however supersized.
"He asks how this chap can
speak to billions of people
"simultaneously, which is
rather like wondering why,
"if Tony Blair is an octopus,
he has only two arms.
"For Judeo-Christianity,
God is not a person
"in the sense that Al Gore arguably is,
[audience laughs]
"nor is he a principle,
an entity, or existent.
"In one sense of the word, it
would be perfectly coherent
"for religious types to claim
"that God does not, in fact, exist.
"He is, rather, the
condition or possibility
"of any entity whatsoever,
including ourselves.
"He is the answer to
why there is something
"rather than nothing.
"God and the universe do not add up to two
"any more than my envy and my left foot
"constitute a pair of objects."
What Eagleton is saying in logical terms
is that Dawkins has
committed a category mistake
in confusing, I think
Dawkins is maybe thinking
about God like, like the Jim Carrey movie
where he had the powers
of God and so forth.
But nevertheless, here's what
he said at Yale University
in his Terry lectures.
"All I can claim in this respect, alas,
"is that I think I may know
just about enough theology
"to be able to spot when
someone like Richard Dawkins
"or Christopher Hitchens, a
couplet I shall henceforth
"reduce for convenience to the
solitary signifier Ditchkins
[audience laughs]
"is talking out of the back of his neck."
Typically, atheists are not
concerned to know deep theology.
As a matter of fact, when you
read through The God Makers,
it's obvious that Dawkins
has heard some good theology,
because then he wants to say,
but that's not the normal theology,
or that's an unusual strain,
these sorts of things.
Next is materialism.
Although, materialism, okay.
I need to back up.
Materialism.
By and large, the new atheists
are thoroughgoing materialists,
what philosophers refer to
as eliminative materialists.
That means they don't accept any realities
beyond the physical; thus,
they deny not only God,
angels, demons, that
sort of thing, the soul.
They also deny the mind
as being something other than the brain.
And so our thoughts are all caused
by, by electrochemical reactions.
Basically, it leads to
metaphysical determinism.
And this causes then numerous problems.
So many of them will deny free will.
This undermines rationality,
and it undermines relationality.
But they are, many of them,
thoroughgoing materialists.
And then there's a
religion-like sociology.
Remember, I talked about Dan
Dennett and Christianity.
I said, don't say silly things
like Christianity's not a religion.
But from an anthropological standpoint,
atheism can look a lot
like a religion, too.
Now, please understand
what I'm not saying.
I'm not saying this line
about it takes more faith
to be an atheist than to be a Christian.
You know, that one really
makes atheists mad.
If you wanna say it
and then run, go ahead,
but you know, I don't
know that we're going
to get very far with that particular line
in real-life dialog
with real-life atheists.
But, what I'm looking at is the phenomenon
of atheism, anthropologically.
Atheism has many of the
markings of a religion.
It has a controlling story or a myth.
The universe is all there
ever was, ever will be.
Life comes after long periods of deep time
as the accidental combination of elements.
Through natural selection,
random mutation,
we've gotten to the point that we are.
They have their revered writings.
They have their saints,
Marx, Freud, Nietzsche.
They have their saints, Darwin.
They have holy days like Darwin Day.
They have communal groups.
I've spoke at the New Orleans
Secular Humanist Association.
As a matter of fact, I
frequent their events.
And it's amazing how much a
NOSHA meeting is sort of like
a Baptist meeting without,
they take offerings.
[audience laughs]
They just don't have good music.
[audience laughs]
They even have spiritual practices.
Look at this.
This is from the website naturalism.org,
and they have numerous forms.
"Although naturalism may at first sight
"seem an unlikely basis for spirituality,
"a naturalistic vision of
ourselves and the world
"can inspire and inform
spiritual experience.
"Naturalism understands such
experience as psychological
"states constituted by the
activity of our brains,
"but this doesn't lessen the
appeal of such experience
"or render it less profound.
"Appreciating the fact of our
complete inclusion in nature
"can generate feelings
of connection and meaning
"that rival those offered
by traditional religions,
"and those feelings reflect
the empirical reality
"of our being at home in the cosmos."
So we can look at the natural
world and get a good feeling.
Sounds suspiciously like
idolatry, and even self-worship,
when we wire ourselves into
it all and we're connected.
Let me look at a couple of
recent atheistic publications.
First, I wanna look at
the one that Bill Craig's
talking about in more depth next door,
and that would be Stephen Hawking
and Leonard Mlodinow's new
book, The Grand Design.
How many of you have seen this book?
You've perhaps purchased it?
It's sitting on your coffee table?
It's kind of a coffee table looking book.
Beautiful pictures, and
really expensive paper.
[audience laughs]
I mean, don't you love pages
that just feel good in your hand?
And I mean, there's a wealth
of good information, exciting stuff.
This is a well-written book.
You know, good authors, good prose.
There's a lot to like in it.
Well, who is Stephen Hawking?
If you don't know, well,
he's a world-renown
theoretical physicist.
Until recently, they're not coming for me.
[audience laughs]
Until recently, he was the
Lucasian Professor of Mathematics
at Cambridge University.
That was the chair Sir Isaac Newton held.
He's a Fellow of the Royal Society,
and he's a Presidential
Medal of Freedom winner.
What's all the fuss about with this book?
Well, the last page of the book says this:
"Because there is a law like gravity,
"the universe can and will
create itself out of nothing
"in the manner described in chapter six."
Basically, he says we don't need God,
because the universe will create itself.
Well, let's look at some
important features of the book.
Five pages in, we read this.
He goes on and he talks
about deep things in life,
and he says, "The deep things,
traditionally, these are
"questions for philosophy,
but philosophy is dead."
I kind of felt offended when I read that.
[audience laughs]
But he says this.
"Philosophy has not kept
up with modern developments
"in science, particularly physics.
"Scientists have become
the bearers of the torch
"of discovery in our quest for knowledge."
So he says that.
But notice this.
I was interested in, I
read through the book,
and I kept running into
philosophers, Thales,
Anaximander, Empedocles,
Heraclitus, Democritus,
Plato, Aristotle,
Epicurus, Thomas Aquinas,
Rene Descartes, George
Berkeley, David Hume.
Apparently, he likes some philosophers.
Well, frankly, this is
unbelievably simplistic.
Furthermore, I'm not sure what it means
when he says philosophy has not kept up
with modern developments in science.
I mean, he hasn't, he
didn't say philosophers.
I think he means philosophers.
But if he said philosophy, that would be
kind of like mathematics can't dribble.
So, if he does mean philosophers
have not kept up with
science, is that true?
Well, yes and no.
Some have, and some haven't.
And the same could be
said about scientists,
that scientists have not
kept up with philosophy,
as we're going to see in a
moment, at least some of them.
But I don't think for that
reason that science is dead.
As a matter of fact, I'm
married to a scientist.
And there's a philosopher
in the next building
who's certainly done a good job
keeping up with science, Bill Craig.
And there will be others
speaking at this conference
who have done so as well.
Secondly, Hawking has a high
regard for scientific law,
but it works out in a false dichotomy.
This is something he said
in a newspaper interview.
He said, "The question is,
is the way the universe began
"chosen by God for reasons
we can't understand,
"or was it determined by a law of science?
"I believe the second."
Well, I believe in scientific law too.
You can't get very far
without accepting the concept
of scientific law, but Hawking has
a specialized understanding
of scientific law,
and we're going to see how that plays out.
But what is a scientific law?
Well, I'm going to use his definition.
This is not where it becomes specialized.
I think most people would agree with this.
Today, most scientists
would say a law of nature
is a rule that is based
upon an observed regularity
and provides predictions that go
beyond the immediate situations
upon which it is based.
That's not controversial.
He says this on page 28.
In modern science, laws of nature
are usually phrased in mathematics.
They can be either exact or approximate,
but they must have been observed
to hold without exception,
if not universally, then at least
under a stipulated set of conditions.
Again, that's not controversial.
But Hawking seems to think
that an efficient cause
excludes any need for a formal cause.
Now, an efficient cause, if we had,
say we were building a house.
We would have different types of causes.
Now, when we us the word
cause, it's a confusing term,
because there are many types of causes.
But causes explain why
things are the way they are.
So they're, it's a shorthand
term for an explanation,
but there are different
kinds of explanations,
and to understand a lot of things,
we need more than one type of explanation
to have a full explanation.
So if we were building a
house, and someone was to say,
well, what's the material
cause of the house, well,
it would be bricks and mortar
and wood, that sort of thing.
If someone, if someone said,
well, what's the efficient
cause, well, it would be,
it would be the builders,
the contractors, using instruments,
so there would be an instrumental cause,
hammers and tools and so forth.
If someone said, well,
what's, what's the purpose
of the house, that would be a
teleological or final cause.
It would be a place to
have shelter, to live in
and to be protected from
the elements and so forth.
But what's the formal cause?
Well, the formal cause is the idea
in the mind of the architect,
which is a two-story house
or a one-story house.
It's a ranch house or a town
home, that sort of thing.
But the idea is fundamental,
because from the idea comes the blueprint,
which gives the directions
to the contractors.
You can't have a full explanation
of why the house is there
simply by saying the contractors did it.
You've got wood and mortar
and brick and builders.
That's not a satisfying explanation.
Hawking seems to think
that the universe itself
can be explained, simply on the
basis of an efficient cause.
But that's like saying
that a Model T is explained
either by Henry Ford or
the laws of engineering.
You need both to fully
make sense of a Model T.
So this is simplistic.
Maybe he should have read more philosophy.
I've got some questions for Hawking.
One is, what does he mean when he says
something like the law of gravity?
Now, a lot of the news reports I read
prior to purchasing the
book basically said,
Hawking says, because the
law of gravity exists,
the universe can and will
create itself out of nothing.
Actually, it reads something
like the law of gravity.
So I wanna know, is the law,
is it the law of gravity,
or is it something else kind of like it?
If something else, what else?
I wanna know, is there gravity,
or just the law of gravity?
Because he's already told
us that scientists express
the law in a mathematical formula.
And if it is gravity, how does
gravity work without matter?
I can understand how we, how gravity works
when two objects operate upon one another,
but I don't get how, without
matter, gravity causes matter.
I don't think anybody else does either.
What does he mean when he says nothing?
Is nothing a little something?
How is either a law of gravity
or a law like gravity nothing?
It's at least abstract, right?
Involves numbers.
Is this nothing a quantum vacuum?
I'm suspicious that it is.
But how is a quantum vacuum nothing?
Now, a quantum vacuum's as
little something as we can have.
It's the lowest possible energy state,
but that's not the same
thing as no energy state.
So, these are questions that puzzle me,
but I find his thoughts
unsatisfying when I read the book.
But here's my real problem,
the logical issues.
If I say X creates Y, then I presuppose
the existence of X to create Y.
But what creates X?
It's logically impossible for a cause
to bring about an effect
without being in existence.
A natural law depends
upon nature existing.
It also depends upon observation,
by Hawking's own definition.
But who observed this law
before the universe existed?
And how can a mathematical
formula cause anything?
You know, what causal property
does the number five possess,
or the number five with really
complicated mathematics.
What causal properties
can that formula possess?
Here's what the Oxford mathematician
and philosopher John Lennox says.
He says, "Nonsense remains nonsense,
"even when taught by
world-famous scientists."
[audience laughs]
Now, here's my fear,
that even though nonsense
remains nonsense when taught
by world-famous scientists,
people will accept it on the basis
of that person's authority and reputation.
I found that to be the case.
Once I walked across the
stage and had my PhD,
it was like my brain grew.
[audience laughs]
People just thought I was smarter
than I was the day before.
[audience laughs]
Now, that doesn't mean they
thought I was very smart,
but I was smarter, okay?
Well, what about the multiverse?
He talks about the multiverse
or a universe ensemble,
but let's cut to the chase.
A multiverse or a universe
ensemble would not disprove God.
Now, this is not what
philosophers are talking about
when we say possible worlds.
That's modal logic.
But I'm wondering, is the
multiverse fine-tuned?
If so, who fine-tuned it?
How did it get that way?
But the truly troubling
thing is that the multiverse,
the other universes and the multiverse
cannot be observed, ever, possibly,
because if we observe
it, it's this universe.
That means that the multiverse hypothesis,
if you want to give it
the name hypothesis,
it may be better called a conjecture,
is not falsifiable.
But when I was editing the
Intelligent Design book,
I heard over and over
that it's not science
if it's not falsifiable.
Furthermore, the multiverse is not simple.
Scientists judge a
hypothesis or an explanation
as to how good it is by how simple it is.
You know, the simpler
solution is preferable.
One God, 500 million universes?
Seems pretty obvious.
But you can't even make
predictions from the multiverse,
and that's another criteria
by which, criterion by which
scientific hypotheses are assessed.
So it's not observable,
it's not falsifiable,
it's not simple, you can't
make predictions from it.
It's not faring very well.
He wants to go into M theory,
which is a more complicated
theory than multiverse
based on string theory,
and here's what his former
collaborator and atheist friend
Roger Penrose says about The Grand Design.
He says, "The book is a bit misleading.
"It gives you this impression of a theory
"that is going to explain everything.
"It's nothing of the sort.
"It's not even a theory."
He says this about M theory.
M theory is a theoretical
group of explanations,
of possible theories.
He says this.
"Various remarkable
mathematical developments
"have indeed come out of string
theoretic and related ideas;
"however, I remain profoundly unconvinced
"they are very much other
than just striking pieces
"of mathematics, albeit with input
"from some deep physical ideas.
So what he's saying is,
the math is really cool,
but I'm not sure there's
any referent to it.
And then I was just stunned
near the end of the book
when I read this.
Hawking says on 172, "It's
reasonable to ask who or what
"created the universe,
but if the answer is God,
"then the question has
merely been deflected
"to that of who created God."
Dawkins says this over and over again.
This is probably the most
common thing we hear today
from atheists, and it's just silly.
Here's what agnostic or
atheist, he calls himself
atheist some days, agnostics on others.
I guess he's atheist on
days that start with T.
Michael Ruse, who was also
a Greer-Heard Forum guest,
he said this.
"If God caused the world, what caused God?
"The standard reply is
that God needs no cause
"because he is a necessary being,
"eternal, outside time.
"Just as two plus two
equals four is uncaused
"and always true, so is God's existence.
"Now, you might want to
worry about the notion
"of necessary existence,
but at least you should know
"that it is something to worry about.
"And if you are going
to reject the notion,
"then you must yourself
address the key question
"behind the proof, the question
that Martin Heidegger,"
another atheist philosopher,
"said was the fundamental
question of metaphysics:
"why is there something
rather than nothing?
"If not God, then what?"
And so we see that.
Let's briefly look at Richard Dawkins.
I'll rush through this.
Here's page five of The God Delusion.
Dawkins says, "If this
book works as I intend,
"religious readers who open it
"will be atheists when they put it down."
There's another mark of
religion, evangelism.
[audience laughs]
It was really interesting to
me when I read Dawkins's book
his discussion of the anthropic principle,
because I didn't think
he was getting it right.
Now, the anthropic principle is an idea
Brandon Carter came up
with, and I don't have time
to explain it if you're
not familiar with it.
Maybe in the Q&A.
But in The God Delusion,
Dawkins says that the anthropic
principle is an alternative
explanation to design.
Let me say quickly, there are
multiple anthropic principles.
Some of them are.
Not all of them.
[audience laughs]
But he mentions, he points
readers, he recommends this book,
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle
by John Barrow and Frank
Tipler, two physicists.
And he says, "A number of
amazing coincidences have
"to be extremely fine-tuned
for life to be possible
"anywhere in the universe,
and especially on earth.
"It appears that the fabric
of life was made for humans."
And then he said, and Hawkings deal with,
Hawking deals with this as well.
Well, what he, he mentions this book.
Interestingly enough, Frank
Tipler is a friend of mine.
He teaches at Tulane University,
located in New Orleans where I teach.
And I've read a good bit of the book.
Now, the book is long and complicated,
and I wonder if Dawkins
recommends the book
because he figures,
nobody'll read that book.
[audience laughs]
And once you get up to about
600, I mean, the math is,
it starts off gentle.
It's well written, good description.
But these guys are
physicists, and at some point,
they just can't help themselves.
They have to do really complicated math.
I'm talking about the kinds
of math with no numerals.
[audience laughs]
And so, I read it as far as I could go,
and so I emailed Frank,
'cause I, and here's,
this is part of the email.
So I asked Frank, are you
arguing that the Big Bang
or the singularity arises
out of literal nothingness?
See, there's a chapter in the
book that Dawkins recommended,
so I guess it's atheist-friendly,
that's entitled Creation Out of Nothing,
Creation Ex Nihilo.
Are you arguing that it
arises out of literal nothing,
nothingness, that it
arises, or that it arises
out of what appears to
be literally nothing
but is actually not nothing,
or that it may be or may not
be out of literal nothingness?
The longer I typed, the
more paranoid I got.
[audience laughs]
And here's what the author of the book
that Dawkins recommended emailed me back.
This is exactly, and I haven't changed
anything in this except the ellipsis.
I took out some stuff in the middle
not related to the conversation.
"This is exactly," in caps, Tipler,
"what physics shows to be the case.
"Before the singularity,
there was nothingness.
"This is literal nothingness.
"There was no space, no time, no matter,
"no nothing."
He's good at math, not English.
[audience laughs]
"The initial singularity does
not arise out of anything."
And let's look at The God
Delusion's central argument.
Dawkins is proud of this.
He says, "One of the greatest challenges
"to the human intellect has
been to explain how the complex,
"improbable appearance of
design in the universe arises.
"The natural temptation is to attribute
"the appearance of design
to actual design itself.
"The temptation is a false one,
"because the designer
hypothesis immediately raises
"a larger problem of who
designated the designer."
We're back to that trite
true, yeah, it's not truism.
It's just a silly statement.
"The most ingenious and
powerful explanation of design
"is Darwinian evolution
by natural selection."
Fine, that deals with biology.
There's a lot more in this
universe than biology.
"Five, we don't have an equivalent
explanation for physics.
"Six, we should not give up the hope
"of a better explanation
arising in physics,
"something as powerful as
Darwinism is for biology."
Now, he's the guy that complained
about faith being without evidence.
We're just gonna hope.
"Therefore, God almost
certainly does not exist."
So what, what should we think of it?
Well, the argument is invalid.
That means that the form is flawed.
The conclusion does not
follow from the premises.
And that's all you need to realize
that's not a good argument.
It fails formally.
At least one of the premises,
premise three, is obviously false.
We simply don't have to
explain the explanation.
You know, if we had to
explain every explanation,
we'd be in an infinite regress.
We could never explain anything.
So this argument not only fails formally;
it fails substantially,
and those are all the ways
you can fail, so it fails in
every way an argument can fail.
[audience laughs]
"Furthermore, Dawkins
insists that if God exists,
"then he has to be at least
as complex as the universe,
"and thus, the explanation
of God is no explanation.
"Well, this is confused.
"There's no reason to think
such a thing concerning God.
"God is metaphysically simple,
as in an unembodied mind.
"He has no parts, but he may
have highly complex ideas.
"See, Dawkins seems, in my
view, to confuse an idea
"with the being that has the
idea, that you can't have
"a complex idea without
being a complex being.
"God is as simple as
an explanation can be.
"Now, here's something
I think is revealing.
Now, this is weird, okay?
But it's cool weird, okay?
It's not weird like, you know,
the kid that picks his
nose and eats it, okay?
[audience laughs]
What was his conclusion?
"Therefore, God," what, "almost
certainly does not exist."
Almost, not certainly doesn't exist.
The buses say God probably doesn't exist.
So, let's look at this
ontological argument.
It is possible that a
maximally great being exists.
Now, I don't have time to
explain all of this to you,
but question, premises two
through five are conditionals.
If it's possible that a
maximally great being exists,
then a maximally great being
exists in some possible world.
If a maximally great being
exists in some possible world,
then it exists in every possible world.
If a maximally great being
exists in every possible world,
then it exists in the actual world.
If a maximally great being
exists in the actual world,
then a maximally great being exists;
therefore, a maximally great being exists.
Now, premises two through
six are simply doing logic.
They're not debatable,
or the whole project
of modal logic is a failure.
The only questionable premise is one,
and Dawkins has already granted it.
If he's really logical,
he should believe it.
But he doesn't,
and that leads us back to
where Dallas Willard ended.
Most of the problems of the
human heart or the human
existence are problems of
the heart, not the head.
I think that's what Pascal
was about with the wager.
Anybody would make that
bet, but not everybody does.
That mean it's not a rational problem;
it's a problem of the heart.
And that means that we have to do
what Dallas talked about earlier.
Yes, we have to have arguments,
but if we don't couch
the arguments with Christian concern,
with Christian spirituality,
genuine, deep, life-changing
devotion to Christ,
we won't be effective as apologists.
So, thank you for your time.
I'll be here to take questions.
I think I've gone a few minutes over.
I appreciate your patience.
I'll gladly answer all your questions.
Thanks for having me.
[audience applauds]
[upbeat instrumental music]
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