Start with nothing . . . absolutely nothing. No air. No matter . . . not even an atom. No energy. No space. No thought. No time. Just a long dead silence. This is the evolutionist’s reality before the dawn of something becoming everything. At some infinitesimal moment in time all the stuff that makes up our world came into being. Like the Millennium Falcon coming out of light speed, the cosmos appeared, the difference being, there was no Millennium Falcon or light to measure its speed. Once there was nothing, now there is everything.
Even the discovery of the Higgs boson “God Particle” can’t save the evolutionary theorists since it’s something rather than nothing. How did the Particle get here? Why does it act the way it does? Why did scientists believe that it existed even though they never observed its existence?
In 2010, the darling of everything materialistic, Stephen W. Hawking, argued that the laws of physics allow for the universe to have created itself . . . from nothing. In his book, The Grand Design, Hawking states:
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”
This is science? Where are the experiments to back up the claims he attributes to physics? The first thing a budding scientist learns is that spontaneous generation does not happen. Louis Pasteur and Francesco Redi’s experiments disproved the theory some time ago.
Hawking is theorizing. But because he is a noted scientist whose speculations fit what atheists want and need to believe in order to make their theoretical worldview work, some people are willing to believe him. “Stephen Hawking said it; I believe him; that settles it.”
The religious component to atheism is evident when you listen carefully to the high priests of the system. Take, for example, Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature) who were asked to respond to the argument that evolutionary scientists do not allow outside criticism of the evolutionary worldview. How can evolutionists do this when science is a discipline of open inquiry?
Stanley Fish observed something remarkable in the way Dawkins explained how scientists do science:
[W]hen we accept the conclusions of scientific investigation we necessarily do so on trust (how many of us have done or could replicate the experiments?) and are thus not so different from religious believers, Dawkins and Pinker asserted that the trust we place in scientific researchers, as opposed to religious pronouncements, has been earned by their record of achievement and by the public rigor of their procedures. In short, our trust is justified, theirs is blind.
It was at this point that Dawkins said something amazing, although neither he nor anyone else picked up on it. He said: in the arena of science you can invoke Professor So-and-So’s study published in 2008, “you can actually cite chapter and verse.” ((Stanley Fish, “Citing Chapter and Verse: Which Scripture Is the Right One?, The New York Times (March 26, 2012). ))
An odd choice of words: “chapter and verse.” Scientism is a religion with its own inspired books (“studies” by scientists). Consider Albert Einstein’s so-called “God Letter” that he wrote in Germany a year before his death in 1955. The letter was purchased in 2008 for more than $400,000. Einstein wrote the letter on Princeton University letterhead to philosopher Erik Gutkind after he read his book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt (for the full text see here). In response, Einstein wrote the following: “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change this.” ((The 1955 quotation seems to contradict a conversation Einstein had with William Hermanns, in which Einstein said, “As I have said so many times, God doesn’t play dice with the world.” See Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man, page 58. There is no indication in this book that Einstein is anything but a theist, but the kind of theist he was may remain a mystery.))
As I write this, the letter is being sold on eBay with starting bid of $3 million. For an atheist like Dawkins, Einstein’s “God Letter” is sacred Scripture, and yet the opinions of Einstein are those of an evolved being made up of atoms that are little different from those of a chimpanzee.
Why was Einstein’s brain any more right on the topic of God than anyone else’s brain? While Einstein thought about the far reaches of space, he never went there. He doesn’t have first-hand knowledge of anything beyond the world in which he lived. C. S. Lewis describes the problem that people like Dawkins have when they rely on the views of other evolved beings for “chapter and verse” about the origin of permanent and meaningful things:
“If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on bio-chemistry, and bio-chemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. . . . The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself.” ((C. S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry,” delivered at the Oxford Socratic Club, 1944, published in They Asked for a Paper (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962), 164–165.))
It doesn’t matter if there isn’t any empirical science behind anything Hawking says on the subject, as long as atheists hear him say, via a voice synthesizer designed and created by someone, “I think Science can explain the Universe without the need for God.” Even some liberals aren’t buying what Stephen is hawking:
In saying this, Hawking doesn’t speak like a scientist: he speaks like a (speculative) philosopher. . . . To say that [the universe created itself] spontaneously is not an answer: it’s an excuse for an answer. When Hawking says that the spontaneous self-creation of the universe “out of nothing” is evidence that a creator was not involved, he is not speaking as a scientist. He is not making a scientific statement. His statement is pure theology — of the negative kind typical of atheists. ((Ervin Laszlo writing for the Huffington Post.))
And yet, Hawking’s assertions are taken seriously as scientific fact while someone who questions the theory of evolution — a process that has never been observed — is made out to be anti-science.
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