Posted on 04/26/2016 4:36:36 PM PDT by Mr. Mojo
They say there are no atheists in the foxhole.
Even fewer when death is certain.
None once the final curtain falls.
God’s Word declares, “The fool hath said in his heart ‘there is no God'” (Psalm 14).
For three decades, until his death in 1953, Josef Stalin was the mass-murdering atheist dictator of Soviet Russia.
He was also a fool.
In his 1994 book, “Can Man Live Without God,” famed Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias recounts a story he heard firsthand from British Journalist Malcomb Muggeridge “that stirred [him] then and still does even yet.”
Muggeridge had collaborated with Svetlana Stalin, Josef Stalin’s daughter, on a BBC documentary about her God-hating father. She recounted his last act of defiant rebellion against the Creator: “[A]s Stalin lay dying, plagued with terrifying hallucinations, he suddenly sat halfway up in bed, clenched his fist toward the heavens once more, fell back upon his pillow, and was dead.”
“[H]is one last gesture,” observed Zacharias, “was a clenched fist toward God, his heart as cold and hard as steel.”
In my experience it is something common among atheists: an inexplicable, incongruent and visceral hatred for the very God they imagine does not exist.
Indeed, Romans 1:20 notes, “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”
Yet excuses they make.
Psalm 19:1 likewise observes: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”
The manifest intentionality and fine-tuning of all creation reveals design of breathtaking complexity. The Creator is of incalculable intelligence and infinite splendor. As I see it, atheism provides a case study in willful suspension of disbelief – all to escape, as the God-denier imagines it, accountability for massaging the libertine impulse.
“Wouldn’t the atheist ‘suspend belief’?” you might ask.
No, the phrase is properly “suspension of disbelief.” It is defined as “a willingness to suspend one’s critical faculties and believe the unbelievable; sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment.”
In the case of the atheist, or the “freethinker,” as they paradoxically prefer, that which is unbelievable is that somehow everything came from nothing – that there is no uncaused first cause; that God does not exist, even as knowledge of His being is indelibly written on every human heart and proved by all He has made.
Be they theist, atheist or anti-theist, on this nearly all scientists agree: In the beginning there was nothing. There was no time, space or matter. There wasn’t even emptiness, only nothingness. Well, nothing natural anyway.
Then: bang! Everything. Nonexistence became existence. Nothing became, in less than an instant, our inconceivably vast and finely tuned universe governed by what mankind would later call – after we, too, popped into existence from nowhere, fully armed with conscious awareness and the ability to think, communicate and observe – “natural law” or “physics.”
Time, space, earth, life and, finally, human life were not.
And then they were.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Christian author Eric Metaxas notes, “The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all. For example, astrophysicists now know that the values of the four fundamental forces – gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ nuclear forces – were determined less than one-millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction – by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000 – then no stars could have ever formed at all. Feel free to gulp. … It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really?”
Secular materialists claim it can’t be – that such explanation is a “God of the gaps” explanation and, therefore, must be banished from the realm of scientific inquiry. They demand that anything beyond the known natural is off-limits. Atheists attribute all of existence to, well, nothing. It just kind of happened. Genesis 1:1 of the materialist bible might read: “In the beginning nothing created the heavens and the earth.” Even in the material world that’s just plain silly. Nothing plus nothing equals something? Zero times zero equals everything?
And so, they have “reasoned” themselves into a corner. These same materialists acknowledge that, prior to the moment of singularity – the Big Bang – there was no “natural.” They admit that there was an unnatural time and place before natural time and space – that something, sometime, somewhere preceded the material universe. That which preceded the natural was, necessarily, “beyond the natural” and, therefore, was, is and forever shall be “supernatural.”
Reader, meet God.
In short: the Big Bang blows atheism sky high.
Fred Hoyle is the atheist astronomer who coined the term “Big Bang.” He once confessed that his disbelief was “greatly shaken” by the undisputed science, writing that “a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology.”
Albert Einstein, who is often dishonestly characterized as having been an atheist, agreed that God-denial is foolishness. He once said of non-believers: “The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who – in their grudge against traditional religion as the ‘opium of the masses’ – cannot hear the music of the spheres.”
“I’m not an atheist,” added Einstein. “The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.”
Illustrious NASA scientist (and agnostic) Dr. Robert Jastrow (1925-2008) put it this way: “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
Yes, with time and chance, even science may eventually catch up to God’s Word.
The argument would be that we are here to see the ONE TIME that everything did come together and lead to us.
the one dot on an infinite line.
Where’s my medical marijuana?
Bookmark
A week ago I was looking at the beauty of Sedona and had no problem discerning the works of God surrounding me.
The more I learn about science, the more I believe in God. I cannot believe the universe exists and life exists by chance. That just doesn't work for me. I believe that cosmology and evolution are the mechanisms by which the Creator chose to bring the universe, and bring life to its current state. I believe scientists get closer over time to understanding these processes.
I regard the Bible as the best effort by men thousands of years ago to explain what happened - the start of that development of understanding.
And I believe God wants us to understand more and more over time. I am not sure if He wants us to understand everything - but if He doesn't, we won't. We'll reach the limits of our understanding.
This is just what I believe. I'm not saying it is right for anybody else. But the idea that to be a Christian, I have to reject science does not sit well with me - and if I believed that, I don't think I could be sitting here typing on a tool created by science.
The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand.
The reply would be "Do you mean the one time nothing came together and lead to us?"
good point.
i think the “we see it because” argument is used more to explain Earthlings.
We experience the universe because conditions were just right for this planet to have life.
What? You mean nothing didn’t create everything? Who woulda thought it?
We observe biological life, yet no one can factually say that such life came from lifeless matter. We see that human beings have a moral sense of right and wrong. From whence did that arise? Certainly not from non-moral matter. We see that humans and animals have consciousness, with absolutely no evidence that such consciousness arose from non-conscious matter. We see that human beings are rational beings. There’s never been any evidence that such rationality arose from non-rational matter, nor intelligence from mindless matter, just as there’s no evidence whatsoever that an eternal creation came from temporary matter. We are driven to the conclusion that biological life, moral sense, consciousness, rationality, and intelligence arose from the eternal non-physical entity that created all things. This conclusion is based on “the most secure generalizations of all of science”!These are the very qualities the Bible attributes to God. He is eternal, non-physical, creative, intelligent, rational, conscious, and moral, and the Bible reveals these divine characteristics to us.
The idea doesn't pass any sort of a basic sniff test for logic. Having all the mass of the universe collapsed to a point would be the mother of all black holes, nothing would ever "bang" its way out of that. Likewise for a supposedly omniscient God to, at some particular point in time determine that it would be cool to create a universe while the idea had never occurred to him in the semi-infinite expanse of time prior to that, is hugely problematical.
All of that is philosophy however. Halton Arp's findings are real. Arp has destroyed the entire basis for believing in an expanding universe or big bang by demonstrating a number of clear cases in which high and low redshift items are joined together and are part and parcel of the same things. That kills the entire idea of interpreting cosmic redshift as velocity and forces an understanding that it (resshift of cosmic objects) is intrinsic.
You’re not a freethinker if you are forbidden to think yourself into some particular conclusion. You might call yourself a freethinker, but free your thinking is not.
Big bang is how it looks from where we sit. That doesn’t mean that it looks this way from everywhere.
But why are we embracing such a premise. Certainly the bible wouldn’t have us do that. A lot of miracles, not just one. We have to reason the best we can, between the miracles.
Honest science, and scientists, already have. It's only the dishonest science from dishonest scientists that still hold on to their damnable lies.
Science may come up with explanations for the Big Bang involving multiverses etc. The cosmos may be more than the visible universe, so deepening scientific understanding may happen but will not necessarily disprove an ultimate Creator, but just push the issue out further than the creation of the visible universe.
It’s a nice poem; however stubborn souls like I continue to say the display is insufficient to posit that a Darwinian scene wins over a progressive creation scene. It’s not the fossils that are lying; it’s our heads that are presuming.
bump
“In my experience it is something common among atheists: an inexplicable, incongruent and visceral hatred for the very God they imagine does not exist.”
Indeed, because atheists do believe in God, they just reject him.
True non-believers are the agnostics, for they simply admit ignorance on the question and then go about with their lives. Atheists, on the other hand, try to shame others into joining them in rejecting God, in order to have more company in their misery. They like to style themselves as logical, but constantly commit category errors and try to prove a negative, demonstrating that their appeals to logic are just a rationalization for what is really an emotional phenomenon.
Also, atheists are only commonly found in theistic societies. They don’t naturally exist outside of them, because they are only produced by rejecting theism. They have no belief system of their own besides the rejection of their parent culture’s belief system.
“Having all the mass of the universe collapsed to a point would be the mother of all black holes, nothing would ever “bang” its way out of that.”
Bingo. The physicists have to hypothesize that if they went far enough back in time, the physical laws we have deduced from observation and experiment simply cease to function, in order to try to paper over this glaring contradiction.
However, if the physical laws are not consistent over time, then we can make NO conclusions about the past state of the universe, for we have absolutely no means to determine how those laws might have functioned except through observation and experiment. Since we cannot apply those methods retroactively to determine what the laws might have been in the past, the very postulate that they use to prop up the Big Bang theory undermines it even more!
ps... I agree with you about Halton Arp, he was definitely on to something. I’m not in agreement 100% with the Electric Universe guys, but they definitely are addressing major points that the mainstream cosmologists are myopic about.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.