The Great Deception

“The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”¹

-Carl Sagan

Contrast that statement with the following:

God is all that is or ever was or ever will be.

This statement could be viewed as a summation of the various “ontological arguments.”  Ontological arguments are arguments that articulate or argue for God as the necessary being.  We have here two diametrically opposed worldviews.  One view proposes that God is the necessary, and the universe is His creation.  The other view proposes that the universe exists independent of a creator, and God is a myth.  Both views cannot be true.  Either one is true and the other is false, or both are false.  Anyway you look at it, there is a great deception being perpetrated upon humanity.

“All the evidence seems to indicate, that the universe has not existed forever, but that it had a beginning, about 15 billion years ago.  This is probably the most remarkable discovery of modern cosmology.”²

-Stephen Hawking

Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking are both well-known and well-respected scientists and naturalists.  Both men are highly intelligent.  Sagan claimed the natural universe is all that ever existed.  Hawking claims that the natural universe had a beginning.  I don’t know if these two claims are contradictory or not, but if not, then what existed before the universe and what caused the universe to come into existence?  It would seem that Sagan’s assertion is that nothing existed before the universe.  Does that mean that nothing caused it to come into being?  Does that mean it has always existed?  Hawking clearly asserts that it had a beginning.  This leaves unanswered questions, any answers to which would clearly seem to be irreconcilable.

“Evolution is a religion.  This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.”³

-Michael Ruse

Michael Ruse is a self-proclaimed “ardent evolutionist” and “ex-Christian”³ and he is also a well-known and highly respected philosopher of science.  To be fair, he states that this quote of his is often taken out of context.  Nevertheless, he still stands behind his words.  Feel free to read his own explanation of his statement.  By the way, this same philosopher has made the claim that morality is an illusion, a claim I have also proposed in other writings (insofar as morality is considered without the existence of God).

“Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program—a possible framework for testable scientific theories.”⁴

-Karl Popper

Karl Popper was another well-known and well-respected philosopher of science.  One area of his academic focus was on demarcating science from non-science.

“Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”⁵

-Richard Dawkins

“Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”⁶

-Francis Crick

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and atheist.  He is the author of The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion, as well as many other books.  Francis Crick was a molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist.  He is famous for co-discovering the structure of the DNA molecule.  According to these two quotes, not only does life in the natural universe have the appearance of design, but that appearance can be so convincing that dedicated biologists must ignore that overwhelming appearance and remind themselves that evolution is the truth.

In the documentary film “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” Richard Dawkins was asked about the apparent design of life on earth.  His answer was as follows: “…it could be that at some earlier time somewhere in the universe a civilization evolved, probably by some kind of Darwinian means, to a very, very high level of technology and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet.”⁷  He went on to say: “…that designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe.  But that higher intelligence would itself would have to come about by some explicable or ultimately explicable process.  It couldn’t have just jumped into existence spontaneously.”⁷  When asked about the origin of life, he stated: “It was the origin of the first self-replicating molecule.”⁷  When asked where that molecule originated, he stated: “I’ve told you, we don’t know.”⁷  Well, a designer couldn’t have spontaneously jumped into existence, because things don’t just spontaneously jump into existence.  Therefore, a self-replicating molecule couldn’t just spontaneously jump into existence either, right?  Or could it?  Is it less of a stretch, less of a leap of faith, less of a disregard of observation and logic to believe that life spontaneously came into being then to believe that an eternal and self-existent God created it?  Well, life might not have spontaneously come into being either, since it could have been seeded by extra-terrestrials.  But where did they come from?  They evolved too.  From spontaneous life or from other aliens?  Where did the process start, since according to Stephen Hawking, it had to have a beginning?

In the short video “Creationism Is Not Appropriate for Children” Bill Nye (“The Science Guy”) asserts that believing in creationism is detrimental to the advancement of science.⁸

“Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science.  Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse.”⁹

-Donna Haraway

Creationism is viewed as an obstacle for science by some and as dangerous (a form of child abuse) by others.

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”

-Romans 1:20, New International Version

“They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.”

-Romans 2:15, New International Version

So what evidence is there for the origin of the universe being a creator God?  Paul the Apostle states in the preceding passages that there are two primary evidences, nature and morality, or creation and conscience.  Put in another way, the fact that the universe exists testifies to its creation by a creator.  The fact that we discern good and evil testifies to a law written in our being by a law-giver.  The fact that we think rationally and have intelligence testifies to the existence of the intelligence that made us.

“They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised.  Amen.”

-Romans 1:25, New International Version

“…They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.  For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.”

-2 Thessalonians 2:10-12, New International Version

There is a lie.  There is a deception.  It is either that God created the universe, or that the universe came into existence apart from a supernatural creator.  One is true, the other is not.  One is a lie (or both are lies).  They cannot both be true.  Which is the lie?  What is the lie?  Could it be the origin of life and the universe apart from God?  It seems to me that both claims require faith like a religion.

Carl Sagan said, “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”

The God of the Bible said, “I am the Alpha and the Omega… who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.” (Revelation 1:8, New International Version)

Sources:

1-      Sagan, Carl.  Cosmos.  New York: Random House, Inc., 1980.  (Page 4)

2-      Hawking, Stephen.  “The Beginning of Time.”  http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html , 01/26/2014

3-      Ruse, Michael.  “Is Darwinism a Religion?”  Huff Post Religion, 07/21/2011.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-ruse/is-darwinism-a-religion_b_904828.html , 01/26/2014.

4-      Popper, Karl.  Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography.  Fontana/Collins, 1976.

5-      Dawkins, Richard.  The Blind Watchmaker.  Norton & Company, Inc., 1986.

6-      Crick, Francis.  What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery.  Basic Books, 1990.

7-      “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.”  Premise Media Corporation, 2008.  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1091617/quotes , 01/27/2014.

8-      “Creationism Is Not Appropriate for Children.”  Big Think, You Tube, 2012.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/28/bill-nye-science-guy-creationism-evolution_n_1835208.html , 01/27/2014

9-      Haraway, Donna.  “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.”  Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.  New York: Routledge, 1991.