06 What next?

This series of opinion pieces has been running in the Grazier since mid September. It began by making the point that believing in God is quite a reasonable thing to do, in fact more reasonable than believing the universe came into being by chance.

Belief in God is at the foundation of many values we have traditionally held, values which are under increasing attack.

My motivation to write these articles was a book, “Practical Ethics” 2^nd edition, which I read recently. The author is Professor Peter Singer, a well known atheist, listed by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential persons in the world today. Professor Singer sometimes appears on ABC’s Q&A.

In the preface to his book, Singer says that he approaches issues such as human equality, abortion, euthanasia, and the environment on the basis that humans do not have “any distinctive worth or inherent value that puts them above members of other species”.  Singer denies any need to believe in God.

He believes rational and self-conscious animals (and he believes many animals are) can be defined as persons. Conversely he believes newborn infants and severely disabled people may not be persons, if they are not rational and self-conscious. If you read his book, you can see where this takes him on issues such as abortion and euthanasia. He also believes that sexual relations raise no unique moral issues at all; he is on the record as saying he sees no inherent problem with bestiality (human-animal relations).

These types of beliefs represent a huge shift from Christian values. Christians believe that God created humans in His image. We are distinct from all other animals. God gives life and humans must always respect this in decisions about life and death.

Things change dramatically when you begin to leave God out of the equation, and things are changing rapidly in Australia at present. Proposals for change such as same sex marriage are not one-off decisions. They are part of a flood of change bearing down on us, and we must be aware of these things. If this trend continues, it will have far reaching consequences, inevitably moving to the whole range of values espoused by Peter Singer.

Peter.

05 The limits of Science.

Imagine you walk into your kitchen and you see a freshly baked cake, just out of the oven. It looks and smells very nice. If you think in a scientific way, you may ask yourself questions like “what sort of cake is it?”, “what ingredients and how long did it take to cook?”, or even “what are the chemical processes involved in producing that lovely aroma?”.

But you are more likely to ask two questions that science can’t answer, “Why has that cake been cooked?” and  “Ought I cut myself a piece?” Science just cannot answer questions of “why” and “ought”.

Some people argue that scientific knowledge has advanced so much that religion is now completely unnecessary. It is out of date in our modern world.

People who make this claim are going well beyond the limits of science. They are actually turning science into a religion. This religion can be called Scientism.

In Scientism, there is nothing beyond the material (what you can see, taste, feel, smell or touch), or at least nothing worth knowing in comparison with what you can know from science.

But, science cannot tell us why mum baked the cake (to give it to a new neighbour), or why we better not touch it (it is not our cake and stealing is wrong). These things surely are worth knowing.

Questions about why we ought to do this and not do that (moral values) are very important. Consistent followers of Scientism have no answers because they believe we are the result of time and random chance, and moral values are just personal preferences. They say that we are just like the rest of the animal kingdom and we can follow our own natural urges, knowing nothing of right and wrong. Such a view is extremely dangerous and depressing.

Science is limited to questions about how matter works and has nothing to say about other questions that are most important to us as human beings. Science is completely silent on questions of God’s existence. So when the Bible says that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”, science cannot contradict it.

If you want to read all issues so far of “The way I see it” you can find the complete series to date on the web site https://thewayhay.blogspot.com.au

Peter

04 Argument from design, the Fine Tuning of the Universe

If you have ever attended a symphony concert, you will remember the orchestra tuning up at the beginning. The individual instruments are already kept in perfect condition, but they have to be tuned to each other. The first violin plays a chord and everybody else tunes to it. If this important step were neglected, the orchestra wouldn’t sound as good.

Our universe is fine tuned to a much greater degree than any orchestra. Constants, such as gravity, magnetic force, speed of light and many others, have to be tuned to an amazing degree or life on earth would not be possible.

For example if the gravitational constant was a bit stronger, by a value of 1 divided by 10 with 60 zeroes after it (an extremely small fraction) the big bang would have pulled all atoms together into a big crunch. If it was weaker by a similar amount, it would have spread the atoms out so widely that they never would have gathered into stars and galaxies.

The other constants of nature possess this same feature. Change any of them, and the resulting universe becomes very different. And remarkably, every one of these different values leads to a universe without life in it.

Which makes us ask the question, Is this universe the result of chance? It is much more reasonable to see this as evidence for the existence of a designer.

Imagine you lived on the edge of town, with a large vacant paddock next door, and you went away for a few years.  When you returned, you saw several new houses, one house under construction and foundations for others. There were frames stacked up, and trenches for plumbing. Would you say this was randomly produced by blind chance, or evidence for a designer and a builder? The evidence for design in our universe is much stronger than for the construction of a new housing estate.

The fine tuning argument may be new to you. I recommend you look at a short video online.

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/transcript-fine-tuning-argument

03 Who made God?

 Ïf God made everything, then who made God”. This is a question often asked by the students in my scripture classes at school. Let me give you two statements, one is logically true and one is not.

1. Everything needs a maker
2. Everything that is made needs a maker.

The first statement can’t be true because you can keep pushing the question back one step and you get to the place of my students. Logically, there has to be what we can term an uncaused cause at the beginning of everything. So the second statement has to be true.

Scientists used to believe the Universe always existed in a steady state, neither expanding nor contracting. Therefore they believed the universe was the uncaused cause of everything.

But now the accepted belief of most scientists is that the Universe is expanding and it began as a single point, infinitely heavy infinitely small and infinitely powerful, about 13.7 billion years ago. They call this the Big Bang (not the TV show) and it marks the beginning of the universe, the beginning of space and time.

Which leaves the big question, what is the uncaused cause of the Universe? Where did the mass and energy and the intelligence for the big bang come from. It must have come from somewhere, because the Universe was made and everything that is made needs a maker. It is perfectly reasonable to call this uncaused cause God, and therefore to accept that God has always existed.

I am very happy for feedback, through this Blog, thee pages of the Grazier or catch up personally.

Here is a short video explaining this argument in slightly more detail.

http://fervr.net/videos/does-god-exist

Peter.