Video: John Lennox on the problem of evil and suffering.

In this video, John Lennox points out that according to materialism the 9/11 terrorists, Stalin, or Hitler, cannot be blamed because they were, (paraphrasing Richard Dawkins below), "dancing to their DNA", so it is inconsistent to believe in materialism and then to criticize God or anything else on moral grounds. But materialists do recognize morality despite their philosophical views that good and evil do not exist. When materialists claim that there are scientific grounds or humanistic reasons for morality, it is just another example of materialist incoherence, another weird thing people believe. If you believe there is no good and no evil, but you believe some things are good and others are evil, then how can you trust your faculties of reason and believe anything?

Outline of the Lecture

• There are two kinds of evil. Moral and natural.
  
• There are two perspectives on the problem, the doctor trying to help, and the patient suffering. One must be sensitive to both perspectives.
  
• Three worldviews: materialist, theist, pantheist.
  
• If God exists why is there evil?
  
• The suffering of others causes some people to believe there is no God.
  
• Atheists claim to have solved the problem: according to materialism there is no good or evil, and the problem vanishes.
  
• But materialists do recognize good and evil.
  
• Atheism is not a solution it does nothing to alleviate suffering.
  
• If there is objective morality there must be a God.
  
• There is no objective morality without God.
  
• Is belief in God part of the problem?
  
• Jesus did not advocate religious violence and was acquitted by Pilate of stirring up violence.
  
• Atheism doesn't solve suffering, it leaves you without hope.
  
• Rather than a solution there is a way of looking at the problem.
  
• God could have made a world without suffering.
  
• But, if there was no suffering there would be no love because for love to be real people must have free will, and to have free will people must be free to do evil.
  
• None of us is perfect, none of us would be in a perfect world.
  
• Q&A
  

Quotes from the Video

David Hume paraphrasing Epicurus:

"Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?"

Richard Dawkins

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, and other people are going to get lucky; and you won't find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.
- Out of Eden, page 133.

J. L. Mackie

If ... there are ... objective values, they make the existence of a god more probable than it would have been without them. Thus we have ... a defensible argument from morality to the existence of a god.

Richard Taylor

“The modern age, more or less repudiating the idea of a divine lawgiver, has nevertheless tried to retain the ideas of moral right and wrong, not noticing that, in casting God aside, they have also abolished the conditions of meaningfulness for moral right and wrong as well. Thus, even educated persons sometimes declare that such things as war, or abortion, or the violation of certain human rights, are morally wrong, and they imagine that they have said something true and significant. Educated people do not need to be told, however, that questions such as these have never been answered outside of religion. He concludes, Contemporary writers in ethics, who blithely discourse upon moral right and wrong and moral obligation without any reference to religion, are really just weaving intellectual webs from thin air; which amounts to saying that they discourse without meaning.”

Manfred Lutz via Simon Wenham

The problem with these types of argument is that, as Manfred Lutz points out, Freud can provide an equally compelling reason for why someone might believe as to why they might disbelieve. Yet, crucially, when it comes to discerning the all-important matter of which position is actually true, he cannot help us.(5) As this suggests, just because you want to believe in something does not mean that it is true.

Czeslaw Milosz

“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.”

This quote is not from the video but it is on the same subject so I include it here:

Dennis Prager

To put this as clearly as possible: If there is no God who says, "Do not murder," murder is not wrong. Many people or societies may agree that it is wrong. But so what? Morality does not derive from the opinion of the masses. If it did, then apartheid was right; murdering Jews in Nazi Germany was right; the history of slavery throughout the world was right; and clitoridectomies and honor killings are right in various Muslims societies.

So, then, without God, why is murder wrong?

Is it, as Dawkins argues, because reason says so?

My reason says murder is wrong, just as Dawkins's reason does. But, again, so what? The pre-Christian Germanic tribes of Europe regarded the Church's teaching that murder was wrong as preposterous. They reasoned that killing innocent people was acceptable and normal because the strong should do whatever they wanted.

In addition, reason alone without God is pretty weak in leading to moral behavior. When self-interest and reason collide, reason usually loses. That's why we have the word "rationalize" -- to use reason to argue for what is wrong. ...

In that regard, let's go to the empirical argument.?

Years ago, I interviewed Pearl and Sam Oliner, two professors of sociology at California State University at Humboldt and the authors of one of the most highly-regarded works on altruism, The Altruistic Personality. The book was the product of the Oliners' lifetime of study of non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust.

The Oliners, it should be noted, are secular, not religious, Jews; they had no religious agenda.

I asked Samuel Oliner, "Knowing all you now know about who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, if you had to return as a Jew to Poland and you could knock on the door of only one person in the hope that they would rescue you, would you knock on the door of a Polish lawyer, a Polish doctor, a Polish artist or a Polish priest?"

Without hesitation, he said, "a Polish priest."

...

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Video Lecture by John Lennox Explains Some of the Scientific Evidence for God.

In this post:

• Science is limited, it cannot answer questions about the meaning of life and ethics.
  
• Naturalism claims everything can be explained in terms of chemistry and physics but that is not true, information, semiotics (signs with meaning such as letters and words), mathematics, and scientific laws cannot be explained by chemistry and physics.
  
• The DNA in living organisms is semiotic, it must have been produced by a mind.
  

This video covers some of the same material as the video in my previous post. I recommend reading that post because this post will be mostly on the subjects not covered there.

In this video, John Lennox Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford lectures on the theme: "Miracles: Is Belief in the Supernatural Irrational?" In the lecture, Lennox explains how science provides evidence for the existence of God and for the supernatural. He also explains why miracles can occur and he discusses the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus as an example of a miracle that occurred.

Science provides evidence for the existence of God

The limits of science.

Lennox explains that all the early scientists believed in God. They expected nature to be intelligible because they believed it was created by God. Unfortunately, over time some scientists have come to believe in Scientism, that science is the only way to arrive at truth. But in reality science is limited. Science cannot answer questions like, "What is the meaning of life". Science cannot answer questions of ethics. Rationality is bigger than science. Lennox also explains that God is not a god of the gaps who's role is diminished with every scientific discovery. God is the creator of the natural laws scientists are trying to understand. He says that science can provide one kind of explanation but there are other kinds of explanations and if you want a complete understanding you have to consider things beyond scientific explanations. He uses the example of a car. You can understand a car in terms of mechanical engineering that explain how it works, and you can also understand a car in terms of person, Henry Ford, who founded the corporation that produced the car.

Materialism is Incoherent

Lennox says that the fact that we can do science is evidence that naturalism is false and that the supernatural is real. He explains that belief in naturalism undermines itself because a natural origin would not produce a human mind able to reason reliably. This is covered in my previous post (linked above), and I also provide more information on this subject on my web site. In contrast to materialism which is incoherent, theism is coherent and does not conflict with science as was explained in the previous section above.

Evidence for the supernatural

In addition, according to naturalism, everything can be explained in terms of chemistry and physics, but in reality there are some things that cannot be reduced to chemistry and physics. These include: information, semiotics (signs that have meaning such as letters and words), mathematical equations, and scientific theories. None of these can be reduced to chemistry and physics and therefore naturalism must be false. The information in the human genome is semiotic and while it is represented in molecules of DNA the way written information is written in molecules of ink, the information and meaning in DNA cannot be reduced to chemistry and physics any more than the meaning of a written document can be explained by chemistry and physics. Only a mind can produce information and meaning. The fact that the information needed to produce life is not reducible to chemistry and physics is strong evidence that materialism is false and that life was created by God (the creator of life).

More information on why natural processes could not produce the information in DNA can be found at: Cellular mechanisms for non-random mutations do not explain how the vast amounts of genetic information in cells could arise naturally. and Materialism Cannot Explain the Origin of the Genetic Code. Intelligent Design is a More Reasonable Explanation.

Miracles

In the next part of the lecture, Lennox turns to the subject of Miracles. He explains why miracles are possible and refutes some objections to the possibility of Miracles. He explains that the universe is not necessarily causally closed and there is no reason why God could not intervene. He chooses the resurrection of Jesus as an example of a Miracle that actually happened. He cites the witnesses who say Jesus died, was buried, and was then seen alive. For the details he refers to his book, Gunning for God in which he applied the criterion for evidence and witnesses proposed by Hume (a philosopher who rejected miracles) and shows that by those criteria the evidence shows that the resurrection occurred.

Outline of the Lecture

Miracles: Is Belief in the Supernatural Irrational?

• Definition of the Problem
  
• The Supernatural
  
  • Is there a supernature?
    
  • The atheist view.
    
  • There is no conflict between science an theology.
    
  • But atheists say there is.
    
  • The conflict is actually between naturalism and theism.
    
  • Blind faith vs faith based on evidence.
    
  • Christian faith is based on evidence.
    
  • Science provides evidence for God
    
    • Early Scientists believed in God.
      
    • Why scientists stopped believing in God.
      
    • Scientism: science is the only path to truth.
      
    • But actually, science is limited.
      
    • There are other ways to know truth.
      
    • Different kinds of explanations.
      
    • God is not a god of the gaps.
      
    • Scientists have faith that the universe is intelligible.
      
    • The fact that we can do science is evidence that naturalism is false.
      
    • Darwin's doubt: naturalism is incompatible with science.
      
    • Darwin, Haldane, Plantinga, Nietzsche
      
    • Scientific evidence for the supernatural
      
      • Naturalism undermines rationality, theism is coherent.
        
      • Naturalism says everything can be explained in terms of chemistry and physics
        
      • Certain things cannot be reduced to chemistry and physics
        
      • Scientific theories and mathematical equations cannot be explained in terms of chemistry and physics - they are not physical, they are immaterial
        
      • Information is not reducible to physics and chemistry.
        
      • Semiotics cannot be reduced to chemistry and physics.
        
      • The human genome is semiotic.
        
• Miracles
  
  • The possibility of miracles and the actuality of miracles.
    
  • Refuting objections to miracles
    
  • First objection: people didn't know the laws of nature
    
  • Second objection: now that we know the laws of nature miracles are impossible.
    
  • The actuality of miracles.
    
  • The resurrection of Jesus.
    
• Questions from the Moderator
  
• Questions from the Audience
  

Quotes from the lecture.

Albert Einstein

“You are right in speaking of the moral foundations of science, but you cannot turn around and speak of the scientific foundations of morality.”

J. B. S. Haldane

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

Nietzsche

Indeed, only if we assume a God who is morally our like can “truth” and the search for truth be at all something meaningful and promising of success. This God left aside, the question is permitted whether being deceived is not one of the conditions of life.

Antony Flew

“I now believe there is a God...I now think it [the evidence] does point to a creative Intelligence almost entirely because of the DNA investigations. What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together.”

...continued...

It's the enormous complexity of the number of elements and the enormous subtlety of the ways they work together. The meeting of these two parts at the right time by chance is simply minute. It is all a matter of the enormous complexity by which the results were achieved, which looked to me like the work of intelligence' ... 'Can the origins of a system of coded chemistry be explained in a way that makes no appeal whatever to the kinds of facts that we otherwise invoke to explain codes and languages, systems of communication, the impress of ordinary words on the world of matter?’

Additional quotes from this video can be found at Video Lecture by John Lennox Explains why Atheism is a Delusion Incompatible with Science.

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Copyright © 2015 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Video Lecture by John Lennox Explains why Atheism is a Delusion Incompatible with Science.

"Is God a Delusion?" Lecture by John Lennox

In this post:

• Belief in God, the creator of natural laws, does not conflict with belief in science, the study of natural laws.
  
• Belief in religion and spirituality is enormously beneficial to the individual.
  
• Christianity and religion have made an enormously positive contribution to civilization.
  
• Atheism, the absence of religion, has been responsible for enormous harm.
  
• Atheism is incompatible with science because a brain that was produced by natural selection would have evolved to enhance survival not apprehend truth and it would not be a reliable tool for understanding anything.
  

Atheism is a delusion

In this video of a lecture given by John Lennox Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, Lennox refutes the assertion that belief in God is a harmful delusion, and he makes the case that it is atheism that is a harmful delusion. Lennox reviews the evidence that belief in religion and spirituality is beneficial to the individual, that Christianity has made an enormous positive contribution to civilization, and that atheism has been responsible for enormous harm. (A post on the benefits of spirituality and religion can be found here and links to several posts on the harm caused by pseudo-skepticism (atheism) can be found here.)

Lennox also makes the case that science and theology are not in conflict. Science and theology provide different kinds of explanations. You can explain a car by describing an internal combustion engine, and you can explain a car as a product of the company founded by Henry Ford. Both explanations are true, but they are different kinds of explanations. Many Nobel Prize winning scientists believe in God. Lennox says, "We owe modern science to Christianity directly. All the early pioneers Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Clerk Maxwell were all Christians." He says Christian faith is based on evidence and the faith modern scientists have that nature is orderly and subject to natural laws originated from religious beliefs about God. Science is man's attempt to understand the universe created by God. God is not a god of the gaps who's role is diminished with every scientific discovery. That misconception arises when you believe there is only one kind of explanation. God is the creator of the natural laws scientists are trying to discover.

The conflict is between atheism and theism. Lennox sides with the theists and concludes that it is atheism that is incompatible with science. A brain that arose through natural evolution, that was selected for survival not truth, would not be a reliable tool for understanding nature. [More here.] Atheism undermines the belief that we can understand the natural world, it undermines the foundations of science. [In Promissory materialism isn't even plausible, it is contradicted by the history of science I also point out that the multiverse theory, which atheists cling to as a non-theistic explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe to support life, also undermines science because the theory is unfalsifiable and when there are an infinite number of universes, anything can be explained by chance rather than by natural law. A third way materialism undermines science is that it makes a priori metaphysical assumptions in favor of naturalism that artificially limit the scope of science.]

Outline of the Lecture

• Lennox explains what atheists are saying about belief in God.
  
• During the lecture he provides evidence that belief in religion and spirituality is beneficial to the individual. He also discusses:
  
  • Atheists say belief in God is wishful thinking but if there is a God, then it is atheism that is wishful thinking.
    
  • Religious conflicts exist but Jesus repudiated the use of violence to defend himself or his message.
    
  • Religion is not the same as Christianity.
    
  • The Romans found Jesus innocent of inciting violence.
    
• The positive contribution to civilization by Christianity has been enormous.
  
• Atheism has been responsible for enormous harm.
  
• Atheists have spread the false notion that Christian faith is blind faith.
  
• Christian faith is based on evidence.
  
• Atheists have faith that the universe is intelligible.
  
• Atheism undermines itself: a brain produced by natural evolution is not a reliable instrument for discerning truth.
  
  • Science and belief in God do not conflict it is science and atheism that conflict.
    
  • We owe modern science to Christianity
    
  • More on how atheism undermines itself
    
• Scientific explanations do not rule out explanations at other levels.
  
• The Christian God is not a "God of the gaps" used to explain anything science cannot explain. The Christian God created the natural laws that scientists are attempting to understand.
  
• Lennox concludes that atheism is a delusion.
  

Quotes from the Lecture

Atheists say belief in God is a harmful delusion.

Steven Weinberg

I think the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief; and anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization.

Richard Dawkins author of The God delusion writes that a delusion is

a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence

Belief in religion and spirituality is beneficial.

Andrew Sims

Andrew Sims, past president of Royal College of Psychiatrists, has said: "The advantageous effect of religious belief and spirituality on mental and physical health is one of the best kept secrets in psychiatry and medicine generally. If the findings of the huge volume of research on this topic had gone in the opposite direction and it had been found that religion damages your mental health, it would have been front-page news in every newspaper in the land (from Is Faith Delusion)."

more

In the majority of studies, religious involvement is correlated with well-being, happiness and life satisfaction; hope and optimism; purpose and meaning in life; higher self-esteem; better adaptation to bereavement; greater social support and less loneliness; lower rates of depression and faster recovery from depression; lower rates of suicide and fewer positive attitudes towards suicide; less anxiety; less psychosis and fewer psychotic tendencies; lower rates of alcohol and drug use and abuse; less delinquency and criminal activity; greater marital stability and satisfaction… We concluded that for the vast majority of people the apparent benefits of devout belief and practice probably outweigh the risks.

Not in the video, but apropos:

Knowledge of the afterlife deters suicide. Lessons From the Light by Kenneth Ring and Evelyn Elsaesser p.257-258:

As far as I know, the first clinician to make use of NDE material in this context was a New York psychologist named John McDonagh. In 1979, he presented a paper at a psychological convention that described his success with several suicidal patients using a device he called "NDE bibliotherapy." His "technique" was actually little more than having his patients read some relevant passages from Raymond Moody's book, Reflections on Life after Life, after which the therapist and his patient would discuss its implicatins for the latter's own situation. McDonagh reports that such an approach was generally quite successful not only in reducing suicidal thoughts but also in preventing the deed altogether.

...

Since McDonagh's pioneering efforts, other clinicians knowledgeable about the NDE who have had the opportunity to counsel suicidal patients have also reported similar success. Perhaps the most notable of these therapists is Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist now at the University of Virginia, whose specialty as a clinician has been suicidology. He is also the author of a classic paper on NDEs and suicide which the specialist may wish to consult for tis therapeutic implications. (14)

Quite apart form the clinicians who have developed this form of what we migh call "NDE-assisted therapy," I can draw upon my own personal experience here to provide additional evidence of how the NDE has helped to deter suicide. The following case

...

For more information on research that shows the benefits of religious and spiritual beliefs scroll down to the References section at Skepticism, The Big Lie. Activist Skeptics and Atheists are a Danger to the Health and Well Being of Believers.

The positive contribution to civilization by Christianity has been enormous.

Jürgen Habermas

For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. Everything else is idle postmodern talk.[37][38][39][40]

From the video:

Behind the European Declaration of Human Rights lies Christianity, behind universities, hospices, hospitals, lies Christianity, behind the abolition of slavery lies Christianity. It is a delusion that Christianity has done no good what so ever.

Not in the video but apropos:

Richard Feynman

Western civilization, it seems to me, stands by two great heritages. One is the scientific spirit of adventure — the adventure into the unknown, an unknown which must be recognized as being unknown in order to be explored; the demand that the unanswerable mysteries of the universe remain unanswered; the attitude that all is uncertain; to summarize it — the humility of the intellect. The other great heritage is Christian ethics — the basis of action on love, the brotherhood of all men, the value of the individual — the humility of the spirit.
- Remarks (2 May 1956) at a Caltech YMCA lunch forum

Not in the video but apropos:

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

We have forgotten just how deep a cultural revolution Christianity wrought. In fact, we forget about it precisely because of how deep it was: There are many ideas that we simply take for granted as natural and obvious, when in fact they didn't exist until the arrival of Christianity changed things completely. Take, for instance, the idea of children.
...
Various pagan authors describe children as being more like plants than human beings. And this had concrete consequences.
...
Children were rudely brought up, and very strong beatings were a normal part of education. In Rome, a child's father had the right to kill him for whatever reason until he came of age.
...
One of the most notorious ancient practices that Christianity rebelled against was the frequent practice of expositio, basically the abandonment of unwanted infants.
...
Another notorious practice in the ancient world was the sexual exploitation of children.
...
But really, Christianity's invention of children — that is, its invention of the cultural idea of children as treasured human beings — was really an outgrowth of its most stupendous and revolutionary idea: the radical equality, and the infinite value, of every single human being as a beloved child of God. If the God who made heaven and Earth chose to reveal himself, not as an emperor, but as a slave punished on the cross, then no one could claim higher dignity than anyone else on the basis of earthly status.

Not in the video but apropos:

Nancy Pearcey

Westerners pride themselves on holding noble ideals such as equality and universal human rights. Yet the dominant worldview of our day -- evolutionary materialism -- denies the reality of human freedom and gives no basis for moral ideals such as human rights.

So where did the idea of equal rights come from?

The 19th-century political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville said it came from Christianity. "The most profound geniuses of Rome and Greece" never came up with the idea of equal rights, he wrote. "Jesus Christ had to come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal."

The 19th-century atheist Friedrich Nietzsche agreed: "Another Christian concept ... 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."

Contemporary atheist Luc Ferry says the same thing. We tend to take the concept of equality for granted; yet it was Christianity that overthrew ancient social hierarchies between rich and poor, masters and slaves. "According to Christianity, we were all 'brothers,' on the same level as creatures of God," Ferry writes. "Christianity is the first universalist ethos."

...

A few intrepid atheists admit outright that they have to borrow the ideal of human rights from Christianity. Philosopher Richard Rorty was a committed Darwinist, and in the Darwinian struggle for existence, the strong prevail while the weak are left behind. So evolution cannot be the source of universal human rights. Instead, Rorty says, the concept came from "religious claims that human beings are made in the image of God." He cheerfully admits that he reaches over and borrows the concept of universal rights from Christianity. He even called himself a "freeloading" atheist: "This Jewish and Christian element in our tradition is gratefully invoked by freeloading atheists like myself."

...

Atheists often denounce the Bible as harsh and negative. But in reality it offers a much more positive view of the human person than any competing religion or worldview. It is so appealing that adherents of other worldviews keep freeloading the parts they like best.

Not in the video but apropos:

James Hannam in firstthings.com

"... the "scientific revolution" was a continuation of developments that started deep in the Middle Ages among people whose scientific work expressed their religious belief. ... Given the advantages Christianity provided, it is hardly surprising that modern science developed only in the West, within a Christian civilization."

Exploding the persistant myth that Christianity impeded the growth of science.

...

Back in 1978, Carl Sagan included a time line of scientific progress in his book Cosmos, showing that nothing at all happened between a.d. 415 and a.d. 1543. This barren period, he implied, was caused by the thousand-year dominance of Christianity. The “conflict thesis” of science and religion was born in the salons of ancien régime France, where philosophes like Voltaire and d’Alembert used it as a weapon against the Catholic Church. It was further developed in Victorian England by T. H. Huxley in his battle to diminish the influence of the clergy in London’s Royal Society. And it was perfected in American universities by the likes of Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, who provided the theory with intellectual ballast in his heavily annotated A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology at the end of the nineteenth century. It has been promoted in countless articles in popular magazines and elementary-school textbooks.

...

... the "scientific revolution" was a continuation of developments that started deep in the Middle Ages among people whose scientific work expressed their religious belief. The conflict thesis, in other words, is a myth.

...

As it happens, much of the evidence marshaled in favor of the conflict thesis turns out to be bogus.

...

It is remarkable that authors who consider themselves skeptics can swallow some of these stories whole.

...

Historians have been debunking these legends for over a century now, but each new generation of popular writers continues to recycle them.

...

Modern science stands as one of the great achievements of Western civilization—not of Islam, China, or even ancient Greece. Many historians of science are still reluctant to admit this. They praise ancient Greek and Arabic sciences as successful on their own terms but have lost sight of the fact that the theories advanced by early science were largely false.

...

Aristotle started from the passive observation of nature and then built up a system based on rational argument. This had two enormous disadvantages: Compared to controlled experiments, passive observation is usually misleading, and not even Aristotle’s powers of reason could prevent blunders in his arguments.

...

Aristotle’s faulty method was struck down by the Catholic Church, allowing previously forbidden ideas to flourish. The Church also made natural philosophy a compulsory part of the courses it required trainee theologians to follow. So, science held a central place in Christian centers of learning that it did not hold in Islamic madrassas. And Christianity itself provided a worldview especially compatible with experimental science.

...

Christianity made science a theologically justified and even righteous path to pursue. Since God created the world, exploring how it works honors its Creator.

...

Christians realized it was impossible to work out the laws of nature through rational analysis alone. The only way to discover his plan was to go out and look.

...

Given the advantages Christianity provided, it is hardly surprising that modern science developed only in the West, within a Christian civilization. Although other religious traditions could have provided a similarly fertile metaphysical ground for the study of nature, none actually did so. Christianity was a crucial cause of the unique development of Western science, the only science that has consistently produced true theories of nature.?

Not in the video but apropos:

Caitlin McDermott-Murphy of Harvard University in phys.org

The Christian church's restrictions on marriages within families is another factor in why Western society became the most advanced in the world. Weakening family ties resulted in unique psychological changes among Westerners that did not occur to people in other regions.

https://phys.org/news/2019-11-incest-dawn-individualism.html

If you're from a Western society, chances are you value individuality, independence, analytical thinking, and an openness to strangers and new ideas.

And the surprising reason for all that may very well have to do with the early Roman Catholic Church and its campaign against marriage within families, according to new research published in Science by Joseph Henrich, chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, and a team of collaborators.

...

"There's good evidence that Europe's kinship structure was not much different from the rest of the world," said Jonathan Schulz, an assistant professor of economics at George Mason University and another author of the paper. But then, from the Middle Ages to 1500 A.D., the Western Church (later known as the Roman Catholic Church) started banning marriages to cousins, step-relatives, in-laws, and even spiritual-kin, better known as godparents.

...

Atheism, the absence of religion, has been responsible for enormous harm.

John Gray

The totalitarian regimes of the last century embodied some of the Enlightenment's boldest dreams. Some of their worst crimes were done in the service of progressive ideals, while even regimes that viewed themselves as enemies of Enlightenment values attempted a project of transforming humanity by using the powers of science, whose origins are in Enlightenment thinking.

This full quote not in the lecture but it is referenced:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.”

This quote is not from the video. I am including it here because it is on the same subject: Layman’s Reflections on Evolution and Creation. An Insider’s View of the Academy

Viktor Frankl (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl), a former Auschwitz inmate wrote in The Doctor and the Soul, that the source for much of the 20th Century’s inhumanity has come from the very origins being discussed here.

“If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.

“I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment; or as the Nazi liked to say, ‘of Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers [emphasis added].”

If Frankl is correct, God help us.

Atheists have spread the false notion that Christian faith is blind faith.

Chistian faith is not blind faith, it is belief based on evidence.

biblegateway.com

Jesus Appears to Thomas

24 Now Thomas (also known as Didymus[a]), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”

But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

26 A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

28 Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”

29 Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” The Purpose of John's Gospel

30 Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. 31 But these are written that you may believe[b] that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

Atheists have faith that the universe is intelligible.

Paul Davies

"the right scientific attitude is essentially theological, science can only proceed if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview, even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith the existence of a law-like order in nature that is, at least in part, comprehensible to us."

Albert Einstein

Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration towards truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot imagine a scientist without that profound faith.

Atheism undermines itself: a brain produced by natural evolution is not a reliable instrument for discerning truth.

Charles Darwin

...with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

Science and belief in God do not conflict it is science and atheism that conflict.

We owe modern science to Christianity

C. S. Lewis

‘Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator.

More ways atheism undermines itself

John Gray

Modern humanism is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth - and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. To think otherwise is to resurrect the pre-Darwinian error that humans are different from all other animals.

Francis Crick

You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.

John Polkinghorne

If Crick's thesis is true we could never know it. For, not only does it relegate our experiences of beauty, moral obligation, and religious encounter to the epiphenomenal scrap-heap. It also destroys rationality. Thought is replaced by electro-chemical neural events. Two such events cannot confront each other in rational discourse. They are neither right nor wrong. The simply happen ... The very assertions of the reductionist himself are nothing but blips in the neural network of his brain. The world of rational discourse dissolves into the absurd chatter of firing synapses. Quite frankly, that cannot be right and none of us believes it to be so. "

Alvin Plantinga

If Dawkins is right, and we are the product of mindless unguided natural processes, then he has given us strong reason to doubt the reliability of human cognitive faculties and therefore inevitably to doubt the validity of any belief that they produce—including Dawkins’ own science and his atheism.

Thomas Nagel from Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False

If the mental is not itself merely physical, it cannot be fully explained by physical science.

Scientific explanations do not rule out explanations at other levels.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

... at the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.

Atheists incorrectly portray God as a god of the Gaps.

Not in the video but apropos:

Richard Feynman

God was always invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time — life and death — stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand.

Atheism is a delusion

From the video:

To sum up ... there are two world views that collide. When it comes to ultimate reality the naturalistic world view thinks the ultimate reality is either the multiverse or mass/energy or something like that. And everything else is derivative including life, consciousness, mind, and the idea of God because there isn't a God he's a delusion. The other world view starts:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him. And without him nothing came to be that came to be.

Do you see the difference? One starts with mass/energy, the particles and ends up with mind the other starts with mind ends up with mass energy. And every scientific instinct I've got parallells the insights of scripture.

Is God a delusion? No. I'm afraid ladies and gentlemen that if you define a delusion to be a persistent false belief held in the face of strong countervailing evidence I would want to suggest to my many atheist friends that their atheism qualifies for that definition.

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Copyright © 2015, 2016 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Realizing the Ultimate

You might have heard it said that "we are all one". What does that mean? The quotes below explain it. These quotes from: an ancient text, an advanced meditator, a near-death experiencer, a spirit communicating through an evidential mediums, a materialist atheist , Christian scripture, Christian theologians, a Native American medicine man, a Jewish Scholar of the Kabbalah, and a Sufi philosopher, all describe something very similar:

According to Wikipedia:

"In Hinduism, Brahman is "the unchanging reality amidst and beyond the world", which "cannot be exactly defined". It has been described in Sanskrit as Sat-cit-ananda and as the highest reality... According to Advaita, a liberated human being ... has realised Brahman as his or her own true self."

J. J. van Der Leeuw, an advanced meditator, wrote in The Conquest of Illusion:

"In that experience [of the Absolute] we are no longer the separate self, we are no longer what we call 'we' in our daily life. Not only are we our entire being, past and future, in that sublime experience of eternity, but we are the reality of all that is, was, or shall be, we are That."

Linda Stewart wrote about her near-death experience:

The metaphor represented by the image I saw and perceived was absolutely clear and I was overwhelmed with the knowledge that WE ARE ALL ONE. I comprehended that our oneness is interconnected by love and is an available, much higher level and means of communication than we normally use but to which we have access. This love is available to anyone who is willing to do the hard spiritual work that will allow us to open our hearts and minds and eyes to Spirit. I remembered the love I had felt in the presence of God and experienced a total sense of love for all existence as an interconnected oneness and a manifestation of God.

The spirit of Charles Marshall communicating through direct voice medium Leslie Flint said:

It is the development and it is the tremendous realisation that one must have eventually of how we are all linked and bound together and how actually the very fundamental thing that flows through us all, is the very essence which is of God. And so we gradually evolve more and more to God or become like him.

I do not refer to shape or form, I refer now to the infinite spirit which is the very life blood you might say of all humanity; where we lose in each other ourselves and discover that we are all in a oneness and in accord. And when we have this oneness and accord we reach a stage of spiritual development where we can be considered to be living in a form if you like of paradise because we are conscious of everything around and about us as being not only "us" but "all".

Lester Levenson who developed psychological techniques that led to his realization wrote:

"This peace was eternal and forever, and it was the essence of every living thing. There was only one Beingness and everything was It; every person was It, but they were without awareness of the fact, blinded by the uncorrected past they hold on to."

He saw this Beingness as something like a comb. He was at the spine of the comb and all the teeth fanned out from it, each one thinking it was separate and different from all the other teeth. And that was true, but only if you looked at it from the tooth end of the comb. Once you got back to the spine or source, you could see that it wasn't true. It was all one comb. There was no real separation, except when you sat at the tooth end. It was all in one's point of view.
...
"It was obvious to me that I wasn't that body and mind as I had thought I was. I just saw it—that's all. It's simple when you see it.

So I let go of identifying with that body. And when I did, I saw that my Beingness was all Beingness, that Beingness is like one grand ocean. It's not chopped up into parts called "drops of bodies." It's all one ocean.

That caused me to identity with every being, every person, and even every atom in this universe. And that's an experience so tremendous, it's indescribable. First you see that the universe is in you, then you see the universe as you. Then you know the Oneness of this universe. Then you are finished forever with separation and all the hellishness that's caused only by separation."

Moving awareness to "the base of the comb", as Lester Levenson described it, is not like losing individuality, it is like remembering who you really are. When you are at the tip of the comb, it is like looking through a kaleidoscope that produces the appearance of multiplicity. When people who have near-death experiences and evidential mediums describe the afterlife, they are not always describing the ultimate reality. They describe various levels. The physical world seems to be at one end and pure consciousness seems to be at the other end, but there are other levels of the afterlife in between. After death, most of us will go to a level similar to the earth plane. It is only at the higher levels that one begins to experience the ultimate. This universal consciousness is consistent with the personal God experienced by people who have near-death experiences. If each of us with our personal nature is part of the universal consciousness, then the universal consciousness must have a personal nature too.

A similar view of consciousness, Panentheism, also exists within the Christian tradition.

According to wikipedia

Panentheism (meaning "all-in-God"...) is a belief system which posits that the divine ... interpenetrates every part of the universe and extends, timelessly (and, presumably, spacelessly) beyond it.

Palamite Panentheism is explained in the video Christianity and Panentheism on youtube. This philosophy is a form of monism or idealism that holds that consciousness is fundamental. Here are some quotes from the video that support this view:

• Acts 17:28: "'In him we live and move and have our being.'"
  

• Colossians 1:17: "And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together."
  

• John 14:20: "In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you."
  

• Athanasius the Great (writing about Jesus): "In creation He is present everywhere, yet is distinct in being from it; ordering, directing, giving life to all, containing all, yet is He Himself the Uncontained, existing solely in His Father. As with the whole, so also is it with the part. Existing in a human body, to which He Himself gives life, He is still Source of life to all the universe, present in every part of it, yet outside the whole; and He is revealed both through the works of His body and through His activity in the world." On the Incarnation, 3.17
  

• Martin Luther: "God must be present in every single creature in its innermost and outermost being, on all sides, through and through, below and above, before and behind, so that nothing can be truly present and within all creature than God himself with his power." Weimarer Ausgabe 32.134.34-136.36
  

• Larry L. Rasmussen: Nature could not exist if the spirit of God was removed.
  

Bernadette Roberts, is described at enlightened-people.com, as "a Carmelite nun who reached a deep state of union through the Christian practice of contemplation. She continues a long tradition of mysticism within the Carmelite Order that goes back to Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Avila."

In an interview with Stephan Bodian published in Yoga Journal and reprinted at spiritualteachers.org Bernadette Roberts said:

So here begins our journey to the true center, the bottom-most, innermost "point" in ourselves where our life and being runs into divine life and being - the point at which all existence comes together. This center can be compared to a coin: on the near side is our self, on the far side is the divine. One side is not the other side, yet we cannot separate the two sides. If we tried to do so, we would either end up with another side, or the whole coin would collapse, leaving no center at all - no self and no divine. We call this a state of oneness or union because the single center has two sides, without which there would be nothing to be one, united, or non-dual. Such, at least, is the experiential reality of the state of transforming union, the state of oneness.

...

As it turns out, self is the entire system of consciousness, from the unconscious to God-consciousness, the entire dimension of human knowledge and feeling-experience. Because the terms “self” and “consciousness” express the same experiences (nothing can be said of one that cannot be said of the other), they are only definable in the terms of “experience”.

Non-dualism arises in every age and culture. It is a universal human experience not dependent on prior beliefs.

Black Elk

Black Elk [Hehaka Sapa] (c. December 1863 – 17 August or 19 August 1950 [sources differ]) was a famous Wichasha Wakan (Medicine Man or Holy Man) and Heyoka of the Oglala Lakota (Sioux). He participated at about the age of twelve in the Battle of Little Big Horn of 1876, and was wounded in the massacre that occurred at Wounded Knee in 1890.

The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka , and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.

Moses Cordovero

The Kabbalah is a system of esoteric and mystical Jewish thought which originated in Provence at the end of the 12th century and spread into Catalonia and Castile. ... After the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, other centres of kabbalistic studies emerged, including Fez, Venice, Salonika and Safed (now Zefat) in Palestine, where Moses Cordovero, (1522-1570) possibly the greatest systematic theologian of the Kabbalah, lived and taught.

...

Do not say "This is a stone and not God."
God forbid!
Rather, all existence is God,
and the stone is a thing pervaded by divinity.
- Moses Cordovero

Ibn Arabi

Sufi metaphysics

...

Wa?dat al-Wujud (Unity of Essence)

...

Ibn Arabi’s doctrine of wahdat ul wujud focuses on the esoteric (batin) reality of creatures instead of exoteric (zahir) dimension of reality. Therefore he interprets that wujud is one and unique reality from which all reality derives. The external world of sensible objects is but a fleeting shadow of the Real( al- Haq),God . God alone is the all embracing and eternal reality. Whatever exists is the shadow(tajalli) of the Real and is not independent of God. This is summed up in Ibn Arabi’s own words. " Glory to Him who created all things, being Himself their very essence(ainuha)"

The various descriptions above of unity of consciousness are consistent with the view based on the sciences of cosmology and quantum mechanics that the universe was created by a transcendent creator.

There are various techniques that have been known to produce an experience of the ultimate. One path to it may involve a progression of states produced by meditation. This progression begins with relaxing concentration which produces serenity, which releases happiness, which allows love (Metta) to flow, which generates a feeling of connectedness to all things, from which a non-dual experience may arise.

Resources

• Lester Levenson's Story at releasetechnique.com
  
• Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book by Dainiel Ingram
  
• What is Yoga as Meditation? Free on-line course.
  
• Not-self is a further refinement of the realization of oneness.
  

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Copyright © 2015, 2016 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

The Cosmological Argument for a Transcendent Designer of the Universe.

Stephen Meyer is a philosopher of science who earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. He is one of the founders of the intelligent design movement which takes a scientific approach to looking for artifacts of intelligent design in nature.

Stephen Meyer appeared in a series of four interviews on the John Ankerberg Show discussing the cosmological argument for the existence of God. In the interviews, Meyer starts with an historical background of the origin of materialism. He goes on to explain how the discovery that the universe is expanding, and the discovery that the universe came from nothing, and the discovery that natural laws are finely tuned to make life possible, all demonstrate that the universe was created and designed by a transcendent intelligence (an intelligence outside the universe). In addition, Meyer explains that the evidence for intelligent design in the origin and evolution of life shows that the designer continued to play a role in the universe long after its creation. Meyer considers four philosophical traditions, Materialism, Pantheism, Deism, and Theism, and he concludes that Theism is the best explanation for the scientific evidence. Meyer also discusses some of the intellectuals who came to believe the universe was designed because of this evidence. These individuals included Allan Sandage, John Polkinghorne, Fred Hoyle, Antony Flew and Fred Burnham.

There are several Nobel Prize winning and other great scientists who were not mentioned in the programs who either believed in the cosmological argument or had similar beliefs. These scientists include Nobel Prize winning physicists Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Eugene Wigner, Arno Penzias, Charles Townes, and non-Nobelists Charles Darwin, and Wernher von Braun. I have explained their beliefs on my web page on Eminent Researchers.

In this post, I have tried to explain the content of the programs as I understand it. However, my own perspective and vocabulary may be different from Stephen Meyer's so do not assume that Meyer has said exactly what I am writing. Additionally, these programs were intended for a general television audience so I think it is safe to assume there is more to be said on both sides of the issue. I am not an expert on philosophy or cosmology but I would suggest these programs be considered a starting point in understanding the cosmological argument. If you find the subject interesting, you may want to look for other, more detailed, sources of information on the subject.

Below, I've also provided links to transcripts of the programs, and embedded the videos if you would prefer to get the information straight from Dr. Meyer.

Contents

• Program 1: The Rise and Fall of Materialism
  

• Program 2: Something From Nothing Requires a Transcendent Creator
  

• Program 3: The Fine Tuning of the Designed Universe
  

• Program 4: The Designer's Continued Involvement: Life and Evolution
  

• Transcripts
  

• Videos
  

Program 1

The Rise and Fall of Materialism

The scientists who founded the scientific revolution, such as Newton, Kepler, Boyle, Galileo and Copernicus, thought that the discovery that nature operated according to natural laws was evidence of a designer. They thought that scientists could come to understand nature because nature was designed by a rational intelligence: God.

Kepler said "We, as scientists, have the high calling of thinking God's thoughts after him."

Newton believed that the arrangement of planets in the solar system could not have arisen through natural causes and the best explanation for the arrangement of the planets was the workings of an intelligent being. He wrote:

Though these bodies may indeed continue in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, yet they could by no means have first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws. Thus this most beautiful system of the sun, comets, and planets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.

However, in the 19th century, scientists began to try to explain natural phenomena without God. Laplace wrote a book attempting to explain the arrangement of planets by natural means. Lyell tried to explain geological features as a result of gradual natural processes. Darwin tried to explain how new species arise from preexisting species. Other scientists tried to explain the origin of life. By the end of the 19th century there existed a materialist world view that could explain everything from the origin of the solar system to the evolution of humankind as a result of natural processes. Materialists had no need to explain the origin of the universe because they believed it was infinite in size and infinite in age. But this belief was not based on any scientific evidence, it was a metaphysical belief.

The Discovery that the Universe is Expanding shows the Universe had a Beginning. This Shakes the Foundations of Materialism

The foundations of materialism began to crumble when astronomers determined that the universe had a beginning. Edwin Hubble observed that all the galaxies in the universe were traveling away from each other. This means that they were closer together in the past than they are today. The farther back time, the closer together they were, and if you go back far enough you can find where the expansion began. This implies that the universe had a beginning.

Einstein's theory of general relativity gave theoretical corroboration to Hubble's empirical observations. General relativity explained gravity by theorizing that objects with mass could bend space. One consequence of this theory was that the size of the universe changed over time. However, Einstein was so convinced of the materialist world view that he added a constant to his equation so it would describe a static universe. When he learned of Hubble's observations he revised his theory.

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Program 2

Something from Nothing Requires a Transcendent Creator

The two lines of evidence, Hubble's empirical evidence, and Einstein's theoretical evidence, that the universe had a beginning, upset many scientists who held to the materialist world view. If the universe had a beginning, then the origin of the universe must be explained and materialism could not provide that explanation. A beginning to the universe eliminated the grounds by which God had been excluded from the materialist world view. It required a transcendent cause, something outside the universe, something beyond space and time and matter and energy, to explain the origin of the universe. Allen Sandage who had been a student of Hubble and continued to study the expansion of the universe, described the origin of the universe as supernatural because it could not be explained by any known natural phenomenon. The scientific evidence led Sandage to convert from agnosticism to belief in God. Astronomer Robert Jastrow thought it ironic that this evidence proved theologians were right and the materialists were wrong, the universe did have a beginning, it was not infinitely old.

In the Beginning, the Universe Arose from Nothing. Materialism Cannot Explain This.

Another scientific break through that shook the foundations of materialism came when Stephen Hawking solved Einstein's field equations for general relativity. When Hawking calculated the curvature of space-time at the beginning of the universe, he found that space-time had zero volume and so it could not contain any matter. The problem this created for materialists was that it required that all the matter in the universe arise from nothing. Nineteenth century materialism answered the question of origins by asserting that everything comes from matter which had always existed into the infinite past, but that explanation became unsatisfactory when Hawking showed the need for an explanation of where matter came from.

Some materialists tried to find a natural explanation for the beginning of the universe in quantum mechanics. However, they were unable to do this. According to the standard Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, you need a conscious observer to go from a probability wave to an actual universe. You would need a mind that is separate from the universe to create it. Other interpretations of quantum mechanics lack an explanation of how an actual universe would arise from an atemporal, immaterial state.

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Program 3

The Fine Tuning of the Designed Universe

The physical laws of the universe are finely tuned in ways that make life possible. One example of this is the rate of expansion of the universe. The expansion of the universe is fine tuned to one part in 10⁶⁰. If the expansion of the universe did not meet this fine tolerance, life could not exist. If the rate of expansion was slightly faster than it is, galaxies would not form and heavy elements generated by stars would not accumulate in sufficient density to form planets that could support life. If the rate of expansion of the universe was slightly slower, the universe would have collapsed too quickly for planets that could support life to form.

The force of gravity is fine tuned to one part in 10⁴⁰. If the force of gravity was slightly weaker, stars would be too cool to ignite and would not produce the heavy elements needed to support life. If gravity was slightly stronger, the stars would be too hot and burn too quickly to support life on planets.

In the interview Meyer says, "...there are about 25 to 30 of these separate parameters that are each exquisitely finely tuned to allow for the possibility of life in the universe"

This fine tuning is too improbable to have occurred by chance so it is evidence that a transcendent intelligence is responsible for creating the natural laws of the universe. The universe was not just created, it was designed.

John Polkinghorne a physicist at Cambridge University thought the design hypothesis was a better explanation of the fine tuning than materialism. The astronomer Fred Hoyle tried to find alternatives to the Big Bang theory but eventually he came to the conclusion that fine tuning of the universe is compelling evidence that the universe was designed. He said, “A common-sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with Physics and Chemistry, as well as Biology, to make life possible.”

One way materialists try to avoid the implications of the fine tuning of the universe is to suppose that there are a huge number of universes all with different tuning so that there can be some that will be able to support life. However, the theories of how multiple universes might be created do not fully explain the fine tuning of our universe. Such theories result in a highly improbable system which is itself finely tuned so you haven't really explained how the fine tuning arose, you have only pushed it back to a previous step and the need for a designer remains.

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Program 4

The Designer's Continued Involvement: Life and Evolution.

At the beginning of the fourth program, Meyer reviews the previous shows. He reminds the viewer that the universe had a beginning and it was designed. The expanding universe shows that the universe had a starting point in time. The universe is not infinitely old. The solution to the field equations of general relativity show that the universe also started from zero volume so we know space and all matter was created at the instant of the big Bang. The fine tuning of the physical laws of the universe show that the universe was designed by a transcendent intelligence.

The remainder of the program addresses the question of whether this intelligence continued to be involved with the universe after it was created. The evidence that life arose through design and species arose through design suggests that the intelligence does influence events within the universe. This evidence was discussed by Meyer in a previous series of programs on the same television show, so it was only covered superficially in this program. The evidence that life was designed is based on the conclusion that the genetic code could not have arisen naturally. Transcripts of those shows are available. I have explained elsewhere in this blog that materialism cannot explain the origin of the genetic code. There are also various articles on evolution elsewhere in this blog.

Meyer explained that Darwin believed that to understand an event that happened in the remote past you should identify a cause that is known in the present time to be capable of causing the same type of event. By this reasoning, one arrives at the conclusion that the genetic code, genetic information, the control systems that regulate processes in the cell, and cellular machinery are best explained by intelligent design. This is because the only known process by which codes, information, control systems, and machines arise in the present time are through the action of intelligent human beings. Genetic information, in particular, arose when life on earth began about 3.85 billion years ago (long after the big bang which occurred about 14 billion years ago), and during the Cambrian explosion 530 million years ago when many new forms of animal life arose in a brief time and without precursors. This is at variance with Darwinian evolution which predicts slow gradual changes from one species to another. Similarly there were rapid increases in genetic information during the mammalian radiation 50-55 million years ago, the origin of flowering plants in the Cretaceous era, and the origin of marine reptiles. All these increases in genetic information show that the designer is still involved in the universe.

Meyer concludes the program and the series with a discussion of some of the scientists who were convinced by the cosmological argument:

For example, Antony Flew, who was a long-time atheist who came to realize that there was compelling evidence of a creator in the physical world, both in cosmology and biology. The historian Fred Burnham has said that the God hypothesis is now a more persuasive and respectable hypothesis than at any time in the last hundred years. I agree. I think it's not only more respectable, I think it's the best explanation of this ensemble of critical evidence from cosmology, physics, and biology that we've been able to discuss on your program.

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Transcripts

Transcripts are available from jashow.org:

• Program 1
  
• Program 2
  
• Program 3
  
• Program 4
  

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Copyright © 2014 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Consciousness Cannot be an Emergent Property of the Brain

(This article is an addendum to the section: Consciousness cannot be Explained as an Emergent Property of the Brain on my web page Skeptical Fallacies.)

Materialists often try to explain how consciousness can be produced by the brain by saying it is an emergent property of the brain. However it is not possible for consciousness to be an emergent property of the brain.

Consciousness has been empirically proved not to be an emergent property of the brain by several independent forms of empirical evidence for the afterlife. If consciousness can survive death, it cannot require a functioning brain for its existence.

More empirical evidence that consciousness is not produced by the brain comes from the several independent forms of evidence for ESP. ESP is not produced by the brain. Precognition, remote viewing, psychokinesis, and telepathy are independent of time and distance and therefore cannot be explained by the known laws of physics including quantum entanglement. Thus, consciousness cannot be the result of any physical process in the brain.

Simply saying consciousness is an emergent property does not explain anything because materialists cannot explain how consciousness emerges. "Emergence" is just an empty promise. Sir John Eccles the Nobel prize winning neurophysiologist called such promises superstitions.

Things that "emerge" have to be the same general type of thing as the thing they emerge from. Consciousness is a fundamentally different type of thing than matter, therefore it cannot emerge from the brain which is composed of matter.

An amorphous lump of matter probably won't roll. But if you shape that matter into a wheel it will roll. The ability to roll is an emergent property of matter. And you can explain using the known laws of physics why some forms of matter roll and others don't. By understanding momentum, center of mass, velocity, kinetic energy, friction you can explain how the ability to roll emerges from matter.

A lump of inanimate matter is unlikely to spontaneously grow and reproduce. However life is an emergent property of matter. If you have a living cell you can explain the biochemical reactions by which a cell maintains itself, absorbs nutrients, and reproduces. By understanding atoms, atomic and molecular reactions, electron orbitals, stoichiometry, etc you can explain how a living cell works, how life emerges from matter.

However, consciousness is not an emergent property of matter. Subjective experience which cannot be measured objectively cannot be the product of fundamentally different objective measurable phenomena such as neuronal activity in the brain. If you study a lump of brain cells, neither the laws of physics nor any biochemical reactions can explain why subjective experiences feel the way they do. Subjective experiences are known only in terms of subjective experience, not in terms of mathematics, or molecular models, or physics, or chemistry, or biology, or psychology, or sociology. Red looks red. Physics can tell you what wavelengths of light look red, and chemistry can tell you how light is sensed by the retina, and neurology can tell you how the signals from the optic nerve are processed by the brain, but none of that will ever tell a colorblind person what red looks like. Consciousness and physical processes are fundamentally different things.

Thinking you will be able to explain how consciousness emerges by understanding more about a massive number of nerve cells is like trying to make a ham sandwich from bricks. You can't make a ham sandwich from bricks and piling up more and more bricks will never get you any closer to having a ham sandwich.

The subjective experience of consciousness cannot be understood in physical terms therefore, consciousness cannot be a result of any physical process. Consciousness is a fundamentally different thing from any physical process.

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Charles Darwin Refutes Materialism

I found an interesting quote by Charles Darwin at evolutionnews.org

Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

It is from a letter by Darwin to William Grahm written in 1881. The quote shows that Darwin believed that the universe is not the result of chance, and that he doubts that human reason is reliable if it arose through natural selection. This is quite a strong refutation of materialism. I knew that Darwin believe that natural laws were designed but I had not seen this quote before so I updated the section on Charles Darwin on my web page on Eminent Researchers. The addition explains how Darwin's beliefs undermines materialism:

Charles Darwin is credited with being a co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection. He was not an atheist, he was agnostic. He believed that one could not know if God existed or not. Darwin also believed that the universe did not arise by chance and that natural laws resulted from design which indicates that he believed in a form of Intelligent Design.

Darwin also doubted human reason was reliable if it evolved through natural selection. This is a key point in the argument that materialism is not a rational philosophy. If you cannot trust human reason, then it is irrational to believe anything, including materialism. It is significant that Darwin's beliefs on this subject undermine materialism because Darwin's theory of natural selection was one of the most important ideas that led to materialism and philosophical naturalism being adopted by most scientists. When you consider that Darwin believed natural laws were designed, and he did not trust human reason if it arose through natural selection, you begin to see that exploiting Darwinian theory as foundation of materialism is a huge scam.

Materialism says that there are no supernatural entities. Darwin's beliefs that the universe did not arise by chance and that natural laws were designed contradict materialism. His doubt that human reason could be reliable if it arose through natural selection also undermines materialism. Since materialists maintain that human reason arose through natural selection, according to Darwin human reason is therefore of doubtful reliability, so it is not rational for a materialist to believe in anything, including materialism. On my web page on Skeptical Fallacies I have a section that discusses in more detail the fact that materialism undermines itself, so I also added the quote by Darwin to that section.

That Darwin was such a poor advocate for materialism made me realize how unfortunately ironic it is that Darwinism, evolution by means of natural selection, was made part of the foundation of scientific materialism. This realization led me to make the following addition to my post on T. H. Huxley: Accidental Founder of Modern Pseudo-skepticism which discusses how Darwinism was used to foist philosophical naturalism on the scientific establishment through a conspiracy led by T. H. Huxley.

It is unfortunate that Darwin was used this way in the adoption of philosophical naturalism and materialism by the scientific establishment. Materialism is a gross misrepresentation of Darwin's thinking. Darwin believed that the universe did not arise by chance and that natural laws were designed - which directly contradict materialism and is a form of intelligent design. Darwin also doubted human reason could be reliable if it arose through natural selection. If you cannot trust reason, then it is not rational to believe in anything including materialism. This argument is a well known flaw in materialism whereby materialism refutes itself. Darwin's beliefs did not support materialism yet his theory of natural selection is a keystone in the philosophy of materialism because it provides materialism with an explanation of how complex organisms arose naturally.

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Kurt Gödel, greatest philosopher of all time, did not believe in materialism, or that consciousness was produced by the brain, or that the brain was produced by Darwinian Evolution. Gödel believed a human is a spirit connected to a body.

I have updated my web page on Eminent Researchers to include Kurt Gödel. Gödel, possibly the greatest philosopher of all time, did not believe in materialism, or that the mind was produced by the brain, or that the brain evolved through Darwinian evolution. He believed a human is a spirit connected with a physical body and that there were beings higher than humans and other worlds than earth.

The update to my web page includes:

From Wikipedia:

Kurt Friedrich Gödel (April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was an Austrian American logician, mathematician, and philosopher. After World War II, he emigrated to the United States. Considered with Aristotle and Frege one of the most significant logicians in human history, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, A. N. Whitehead, and David Hilbert were pioneering the use of logic and set theory to understand the foundations of mathematics.

Kurt Gödel did not believe in materialism, or that the mind was produced by the brain, or that the brain evolved through Darwinian evolution. He believed a human was a spirit connected with a physical body and that there were beings higher than humans and other worlds than earth.

Kevincarmody.com lists these quotes by Kurt Gödel (among many others) from A Logical Journey by Hao Wang.

Kurt Gödel said:

• Materialism is false.
  

• The world in which we live is not the only one in which we shall live or have lived.
  

• The brain is a computing machine connected with a spirit.
  

• I don’t think the brain came in the Darwinian manner. In fact, it is disprovable. Simple mechanism can’t yield the brain. I think the basic elements of the universe are simple. Life force is a primitive element of the universe and it obeys certain laws of action. These laws are not simple, and they are not mechanical.
  

• In materialism all elements behave the same. It is mysterious to think of them as spread out and automatically united. For something to be a whole, it has to have an additional object, say, a soul or a mind. “Matter” refers to one way of perceiving things, and elementary particles are a lower form of mind. Mind is separate from matter.
  

• There are other worlds and rational beings of a different and higher kind.
  

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Proof and Possibility

This post is based on
Four Errors Commonly Made by Professional Debunkers by Grossman.

As I have discussed on my web site, there are several independent forms of very strong evidence that demonstrate consciousness survives death.

However, a materialist may say the evidence does not prove survival of consciousness. Such a statement is trivially true because science does not deal with 100% proof. Only in logic and math do you find 100% proof. Science involves making observations and testing hypotheses from which evidence is accumulated. Additionally, as Karl Popper explained, a scientific theory can never be proved, it can only be falsified.

Furthermore, when the materialist explains why the evidence is not proof, he will suggest an alternative possible explanation of the evidence. This is usually a rhetorical trick based on different meanings of the world "possible". In this situation, "possible" has two meanings, a hypothesis may be logically possible, and a hypothesis may be empirically possible.

A hypothesis that is empirically possible is one for which there is evidence to support it. When the weather forecast predicts the possibility of rain, that is an empirical possibility because it is based on atmospheric data.

However, a hypothesis that is only logically possible does not have to be based on any evidence. For example, the hypothesis that there is a civilization of giant elephants that live underground on mars is a logical possibility. No one has been to Mars to check if there are any underground civilizations there, but no one would take such a hypothesis seriously without any evidence.

The significance of these two types of possibilities is that science only deals with empirical possibilities not logical possibilities. When materialists explain why certain evidence does not prove survival of consciousness after death or the existence of psychic phenomena, they often offer logical possibilities such as fraud, incompetence, or self-delusion. In the case of evidence for survival of consciousness after death, they may offer super-psi as a logically possible alternative explanation. Scientists are under no obligation to refute these or any other logical possibilities.

It is a mistake to acknowledge that such logical possibilities introduce uncertainty about a hypothesis that is supported by empirical evidence. Any scientific hypothesis can be contradicted by a logical possibility. In this case, the burden is on the materialist to provide evidence that their hypothesis is not merely a logical possibility but an empirical possibility.

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