Why I Write This Blog

...they continually say to me, "Where is your God?
                                                                                                     Psalms 42:3

My high school graduation
picture, 1978, a few months
before leaving for the
university.

My University Experience
When I started attending the university in 1979 I was exposed to ideas that challenged my beliefs as a Christian. The secular worldview was strong, especially in some of my biology and physics classes, and I began to assume that most "educated" people probably didn't believe in God. I certainly doubted if any professors did. The atmosphere was stifling and it was a bewildering time for me.

But there were a couple of professors who I learned did believe in God. Dr. Richard Ikenberry and Dr. Glenn Underhill at Kearney State College (now the University of Nebraska-Kearney), where I started college, were Christians. There is a certain irony in the fact that one of them was a biologist and the other a physicist!

Now, many years later and as a professor myself, I suspect that some students at my campus and other college campuses may experience similar circumstances and feelings as I did. However, I don't want them to assume as I did that "educated" people don't believe in God. In fact, many PhDs and professors have strong faith in God, and I am fortunate to personally know a number of them.

Dr. Glenn Underhill, one of my college
physics professors, who was also

a Christian.

Is Your University Experience Challenging Your Faith?
If you are a college student and your faith is being challenged by the secular environment of the university, you are not alone. As a college student and even afterwards, I wrestled with the claims of secularism/atheism/agnosticism/naturalism firsthand. But my faith in God is now stronger than ever.

It is not all bad to have one's faith challenged. As Timothy Keller said, “Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts... It is no longer sufficient to hold beliefs just because you inherited them.” The evidence for the Christian faith is amazing (1), and God is big enough to handle your questions. You can make it your own!

It is another thing to have your beliefs maligned or diminished. C.S. Lewis, who was an atheist before converting to Christianity, knowingly said "Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He doesn't exist." That can be confusing to a college student, especially if the criticism is coming from a professor. However, you don't have to take their word for it! I would encourage students to use this as an opportunity to critically examine for yourself the claims of and evidence for Christianity (1).

Why I Write This Blog
Therefore, I write this blog largely to encourage students (and others) who may be facing doubt and unbelief in the face of the dominant secular environment of our western universities and, increasingly, in our culture. Many of my blog posts address this topic.

I also write for those who may not believe in God - or perhaps haven't even considered it. I sincerely believe if they examined with an open mind the evidence for the existence of God and the truth of Christianity, they may be quite surprised.

Footnote:
(1)  There is much information available about evidence for the existence of God and the truth of Christianity. For example, the authors William Lane Craig (www.ReasonableFaith.org), John Lennox (http://www.johnlennox.org/), Lee Strobel (e.g., The Case for Christ), C.S. Lewis (e.g., Mere Christianity), Timothy Keller ("The Reason for God" and many of his sermons at http://www.gospelinlife.com/), Frank Turek (http://crossexamined.org/), to name a few, all address this in their books and websites.

Is There Any Evidence That God Exists?

"To the majority of those who have reflected deeply and written about the origin and nature of the universe, it has seemed that it points beyond itself to a source which is non-physical and of great intelligence and power. Almost all the great classical philosophers - certainly Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Locke, Berkeley - saw the origin of the universe as lying in a transcendent reality. They had different specific ideas of this reality, and different ways of approaching it; but that the universe is not self-explanatory, and that it requires some explanation beyond itself, was something they accepted as fairly obvious."
                                                                    Keith Ward (1)

Dr. William Lane Craig (2) has developed an excellent 4-minute video that addresses the question of the existence of God through a combination of logic and scientific evidence ("The Cosmological Argument"). Cosmology, which is the science of the origin and development of the universe, has in recent years discovered compelling evidence that the universe is not here by accident (click YouTube video at left or on this link: https://youtu.be/6CulBuMCLg0).

There is more evidence in cosmology that indicates the existence of God, but I will address that in another post!

Footnotes:

(1) God, Chance and Necessity, Oxford, One World Publication, 1996 p.1.

(2) Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig (http://www.reasonablefaith.org/)

Has Science Disproved God?

"Science and religion cannot be reconciled.”
                                                             Peter Atkins

“All my studies in science… have confirmed my faith.”
                                                             Sir Ghillean Prance FRS

Wearing my new glasses!

Recently I picked up a pair of glasses for distance viewing, which for me is the first time ever. I was amazed at how sharp my vision was. The definition and clarity in road signs, trees, and buildings was astounding! It literally took me back almost 35 years to when my vision was much better!

Origins of Complex Life

I began to think about the different explanations for the existence of something as complex and functional as the human eye. A theist (one who believes in a deity) would say the eye was designed and created by God, while an atheist would say the eye emerged automatically out of matter through a mindless, unguided process. As I marveled at the sharpness of my vision, I couldn’t help but wonder whether atheism really requires more faith than theism (1). Why, if something as marvelous as vision simply emerged from the primordial soup, would vision be so sharp? Why, for example, wouldn’t it be sufficient for the eye to evolve just to the point of my present vision without glasses, which is still overall quite functional? (2) This question is similar to, although not as potentially damning as what has become known as Darwin’s Doubt. Darwin wrote:  ‘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.’

 Mathematicians have calculated that  it is highly improbable that the eye could have evolved by numerous small mutational changes since the available time was simply not available. Even so-called new atheist Richard Dawkins, author of “The God Delusion” stated: ‘You don’t need to be a mathematician or a physicist to calculate that an eye…would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck.’ Dawkins’ explanation, in a nutshell, is that natural selection is a law-like process that finds a faster pathway through the space of possibilities, which will increase the probabilities to acceptable levels over geological time. There isn’t space in this post to delve into the nuts and bolts of his explanation, but Oxford mathematician Dr. John Lennox dissects it brilliantly and concludes that Dawkins’ explanation turns out to be a guided process after all (3).

Science has Disproved God?

The new atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins also claim that science has eliminated the justification for believing in God. As a scientist who believes in God, I resoundingly reject that claim. A poll published in Nature in the mid-1990’s revealed that about 40% of all scientists believe both in a God who answers prayer and in immortality (4). There have also been and are some very prominent scientists who do believe in God – Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project, Professor Bill Phillips, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997, and others (5). The scientist Sir John Houghton FRS wrote: ‘Our science is God’s science. He holds the responsibility for the whole scientific story… (6) This reflects the belief of many scientists.

Even the late Stephen Jay Gould, who was not a believer in God, wrote: ‘Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs – and equally compatible with atheism.’ Gould also said that ‘science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God’s possible existence. We neither affirm it nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists’ (7). Prominent atheist Thomas Nagel goes even farther, criticizing the new atheists by saying their conception of nature, which is unable to account for mind-related features such as consciousness, meaning, and value, flies in the face of common sense and is almost certainly false (8).

War of the Worldviews

In his book God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (9), Dr. John Lennox points out that, in light of some of the points made above, the real conflict isn’t between science and God at all. If that were true, the vast majority of scientists would be atheists, which simply isn’t so. No, the real conflict is between two opposing worldviews:  theism and naturalism. Naturalism is opposed to supernaturalism, and naturalism insists there can be no incursion into nature from outside of nature (such as God, angels, etc.). Therefore, naturalists have no other option than to insist that matter and energy must have the potential to organize themselves in such a way that eventually something as complex as the eye, or the human mind with its inherent hunger for meaning and purpose, will emerge.

Dr. Lennox concludes his book by noting that all of us must choose essentially between one of two presuppositions that will form the basis of our worldview. He wrote:  ‘Either human intelligence ultimately owes its origin to mindless matter; or there is a Creator.’

As I drove into my driveway after picking up my glasses, I got out of the car and looked up into the starry sky. The ‘restored’ clarity of my vision truly enhanced the beauty of the moon and stars in the night sky. As I stood there I thought of the Psalmists words: ‘The heavens declare the glory of God’ (10). And I thanked God that he gave me the ability to see with my eyes and comprehend with my mind even just a small glimpse of his glory!

Footnotes:

Leap of Faith

"It is often implied that belief in Christ requires a leap of faith."

The stereotypical televangelists haven't done much to encourage us that there is more to Christianity than simply having faith in faith itself.

Is believing in God just mysticism, deprived of content and contrary to rationality?  Must the intellect and knowledge be set aside in order to believe in God, making our faith irrational? Was our faith simply invented, as the atheist Sir Julian Huxley said, because man functions better if he acts as though God is there (even if he isn't)? I don't think so.

Optimistic Humanism - A True Leap of Faith

I recently read the book The God Who is There by Francis Schaeffer. (1) He argued that since the Enlightenment, when leading thinkers argued that feelings (things only true for me but which we can't be certain of, such as love, beauty, religion, prayer, etc., things they assumed irrational) should be separated from the physical world, or facts (things true for everyone, assumed to be logical and rational). This is secularism, a modern religious belief that grew out of the pride of human achievement, marginalizes God, and masquerades as science or reality. The culture of our universities in the U.S. is infiltrated with this belief.

The problem with secular humanism is that there can be no true meaning or purpose found in the impersonal, physical world alone. How can there be if man has simply risen by chance out of the primordial soup and one day will disappear back into nothingness? There is only one way, and that is to create one's own meaning and purpose...by making an irrational leap of faith! Optimistic humanism is, then, unadulterated faith despite its claims to rationality and reality. In the end, however, humanism (aka, rationalism) can only lead to despair because those things that make us human - hope of purpose and significance, love, morality, beauty, spirituality, indeed, our personalities - are by the humanists own definition irrational. Those things also rose by chance from the impersonal and are ultimately unfulfillable; they are meaningless.

However, if God exists and we are made in his image, we can have real meaning and we can have real knowledge through what God has communicated to us.

Christianity: The Most Rational of All

Christianity is realistic because it says if there is no truth, there is also no hope. It is prepared to face the consequences of being proved false and say with Paul: If you find the body of Christ, the discussion is finished; let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die (2). In Christianity the value of faith depends upon the object towards which the faith is directed: To the Christ who in history died upon the cross once for all, finished the work of atonement, and on the third day rose again in space and time.

This makes Christian faith open to discussion and verification. When Paul was asked whether Jesus was raised from the dead, he gave a completely non-mystical and nonreligious answer in the 21st century sense: "There are almost 500 living witnesses; go ask them!" (3) This is the faith that involves the whole man, including his reason; it does not ask for a belief into the void. (4)

Perhaps C.S. Lewis put it best:  "Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair."

Footnotes:

Scientists Who Believe in God

In this short interview (<4 min) Dr Francis Collins (Director, National Human Genome Research Institute) explains why he believes in a personal God and how his faith is compatible with science. For a brief article about Dr. Francis Collin's road to faith, see Why this scientist believes in God.

Given the apparent "rift" between science and faith in God in our modern world, it is perhaps surprising to learn that many famous scientists of the past had a deep faith in God! Many of today's scientists do too although you may not often hear about them. And like believing scientists before them (see a partial list below), they don't see a conflict between Christianity and science. Dr. Collins in the youtube video above is one example.

This topic is one I hope to visit time and again, but today I simply want to list a few scientists whom you may have heard of who were devout Christians:

1. Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543): Polish astronomer who put forward the first mathematically based system of planets going around the sun.
2. Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1627): Philosopher known for establishing the scientific method of inquiry based on experimentation and inductive reasoning.
3. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630): Brilliant mathematician and astronomer. He did early work on light, and established the laws of planetary motion about the sun.
4. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642): Galileo's troubles with the established church are famous, but his problem was with the institutionalized church, not Christianity. His controversial work on the solar system was published in 1633.
5. Rene Descartes (1596-1650): French mathematician, scientist and philosopher who has been called the father of modern philosophy.
6. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662): French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and philosopher.
7. Isaac Newton (1642-1727): In optics, mechanics, and mathematics, Newton was a figure of undisputed genius and innovation.
8. Robert Boyle (1791-1867): One of the founders and key early members of the Royal Society, Boyle gave his name to "Boyle's Law" for gases, and also wrote an important work on chemistry.
9. Michael Faraday (1791-1867): The son of a blacksmith who became one of the greatest scientists of the 19th century. His work on electricity and magnetism not only revolutionized physics, but led to much of our lifestyles today, which depends on them (including computers and telephone lines and, so, web sites).
10. Gregor Mendel (1822-1884): The first to lay the mathematical foundations of genetics, in what came to be called "Mendelianism".
11. William Thomson Kelvin (1824-1907): Kelvin was foremost among the small group of British scientists who helped to lay the foundations of modern physics.

Science and Christianity

To become a Christian, do you need to throw away your mind & ignore the findings of science? Au contraire!

 
One of my five (yes, five!) majors as an undergraduate was biology. As a biology student who was also a Christian, I struggled with how to reconcile the theory of evolution with my faith. I knew Christians who felt strongly that evolution was contrary to Christianity, but in biology, evolution was the foundation upon which classes were taught. I wanted to stay true to my faith but was unsure how to reconcile this apparent contradiction. The symbols in the picture in this post testify to the hostility between some who hold these “opposing viewpoints”, and represent a sort of warfare mentality of the relationship of science to faith.

For me, probably the thing that bothered me most was the link, at least in my mind, between evolutionary science and naturalism, a concept adopted by many atheists. Naturalism denies the existence of God and teaches that only natural laws and forces (as opposed to supernatural ones) operate in the world and that nothing exists beyond the natural world; life is solely the product of random forces guided by no one (i.e., accidental). I read articles explaining the “evolutionary basis for morality” and “religion as a natural phenomenon”. In a nutshell, they argued that morality and belief in God exists simply because they helped our ancestors adapt to their environments and survive, and not because they are true. In effect, the things our brain tells us about God, morality, and even love and beauty are not real, but merely a set of chemical reactions which only have the purpose of passing on our genetic code (i.e., natural selection).

These assumptions seem reasonable at face value, which only intensified my quandary as an undergraduate biology student who was also a Christian.

My journey on this road was long, but for the sake of brevity I will summarize my view by citing from “The Reason for God” by Tim Keller, who addressed this topic as well as any I have ever heard. Here is a synopsis of his argument:

If we can't trust our brains to tell us the truth about God, as naturalism suggests, then why should we trust our brains in any area, including to tell us the truth about any scientific theory (including evolution)? For that matter, how certain can we be in our ability to apply reason to anything at all? Indeed, reason itself can have no power if it is only a product of natural selection. Charles Darwin himself saw this major vulnerability, writing “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” (1). If our brains are products of random, unguided evolution, then it is as likely we live in a sort of dream world as that we actually know something about ourselves and our world (2). It is disingenuous for naturalists to apply the scalpel of their skepticism to what our minds tell us about God, but not to what our minds tell us about naturalism itself. Conversely, if we believe God exists, then our view of the universe gives us a basis for believing that cognitive faculties work, since God could make us able to form true beliefs and knowledge. Also, if God exists, our intuitions about the meaningfulness of beauty and love are to be expected. If you don't believe in God then these things are profoundly inexplicable. When evolution is turned into an All-encompassing Theory explaining absolutely everything we believe, feel, and do as the product of random forces through natural selection, then we are not in the arena of science, but of philosophy, and it has insurmountable difficulties as a worldview.

You may be wondering what my position is on this topic after all my wrestling. I believe that scientific thought can be compatible with religious belief, which is important since I am a scientist! Many Christians do not believe the theory of evolution; after all, it is only theory. But many Christians do accept evolutionary theory, although in the sense that God created life with purpose and evolutionary processes do exist. Since Christians have differing viewpoints on evolutionary theory, skeptical inquirers do not need to accept one of these positions in order to embrace the Christian faith. Rather they should concentrate on and weigh the central claims of Christianity such as the person of Christ and the resurrection.

There is much more to say about this but I have already gone long. As always, I am interested in your thoughts on this, whether you agree or disagree. Please feel free to share your thoughtful comments!

(1) Charles Darwin, Letter to W. Graham, 1881, The life and letters of Charles Darwin: including an autobiographical chapter;  (2) Alvin Plantinga, "Is Naturalism Irrational?" in Warrant and Proper Function (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 218.

Do I Really Matter?

Biology class took away the wonder I had about our world by implying it all came about by accident. If that is true, there is no purpose for our lives.

Early in my university experience I began to struggle with a sense that nothing really mattered. In biology and other classes I learned that by coincidence, conditions on Earth just happened to be right for life to begin, that lightning happened to hit the "primordial soup", and consequently, life happened to begin (or something like that). Apparently, even though the chances of life beginning here were infinitesimally small, it was likely to happen somewhere because of the vastness of the universe. Oh, by the way, the vastness of the universe also provided evidence that the Earth, and consequently humanity (which included me), was very small in the big scheme of things. In other words, there was a sense that in the end, neither I nor anybody else really mattered. How could we? We rose by accident out of the primordial soup, live for awhile and then we die. End of story.

This all was taught as fact in biology class. What I wasn't taught was that this is really just a secular "worldview", which really has serious issues of its own (more that in later posts, such as Science and Christianity, Leap of Faith, Decline of the Secular University). In a sense, I was betrayed by putting my trust in the secular university to teach me about our fascinating world.

When I was young I marveled at the beauty and complexity of this incredible universe and the life it contained. I was excited and wanted to learn more about it...to explore it! I believed in God but somehow that didn't overcome the underlying sense of futility that seemed present in science classes. I knew vaguely that some of the great scientists like Newton, Galileo, and Pascal were men of faith, but even that was explained away by reasoning that they lived in older times and therefore, were naive because they hadn't been exposed to more recent scientific discoveries (like Darwin's explanation about the origins of species). Archeologists also reported that the ancients invented gods in attempts to find meaning and purpose in their lives, which implied that ANY belief in God was a figment of our imaginations. In essence, it seemed science taught that for one to believe in God was akin to believing in a fairy tale.

It is not my purpose here to diss on the university. After all, I enjoy working there now! I am only telling my story about how I struggled at the university to find meaning and purpose because of what was being taught or implied in the science classes I took. Suffice it to say that I am glad that I didn't give in to despair. There was more to my story, but that is for another day. What about yours? Does any of this seem familiar or am I an anomaly (okay, I may be an anomaly in some ways but surely others have felt SOME of the things I have???)