If this is Science

There is the atheist, and then there is the New Atheist. The New atheist is militant, cocky as the king of spades, and quite disdainful of Christianity in general. Their leaders are good scientists, but make no mistakes; New Atheism is more of a religion than a science. This therefore is about a religion: the pretensions and hypocrisies of it, and the intellectual intimidation that shields it from all criticism. New atheism is on the rise, science is its fuel, evolutionary science is its doctrine, and evidence is its mantra. However, beyond the sophisticated arguments, does New Atheism stand up to its own standard of evidence?

Dr. David Berlinski is not a Christian by his own admission and his general manner and demeanor bears witness to this. In his writings and stage presence he often comes across as boorish and condescending – hardly traits you would attribute to a Christian apologist. He affirms that his lone allegiance is to good science. In his book, “The Devils Delusion – Atheism and Its scientific pretensions”, he questioned the objectivity of his colleagues in the community of science and pointed out the anti-religious sentiment that drives a lot of their assumptions. The desire to prove religion wrong has become a religion in of itself. Western Universities are its seminary, the various museums of Natural History are its temple and museum curators serve as the obliging friars. In this temple, the New Atheist is the High Priests – the protector of the Holy Grail. The religion of New Atheism employs the services of artists, sculptors and great cinematographers to create persuasive narratives from scant and disjointed evidence.

True, there is a lot of superstition in religion, but there is a whole lot of fiction in science as well. The problem is not with scientific findings, but in the fact that evidence is not allowed to speak for itself. Evidence in the hands of an Atheistic zealot is no less dangerous than the scriptures on the lips of a false prophet. The incoherence in evolutionary science does not arise from its hypothesis, rather it arises from the inferences that practitioners draw from their observations. Some scientists play prophets while criticizing prophets. They present theories as absolute facts while decrying absolutes in complimentary realms of learning. They speak with certitude about unverifiable events and refuse to be subjected to the same rigorous criticism that they serve up to others.

Disciplines of Evolutionary Science enjoy the myth of infallibility because of the complexity surrounding the craft and how little attention is given to its missteps. For example, the discovery of famous fossils such as Australopithecus Aphaeresis (Lucy), Piltdown Man, Ramapethecus, Archaeopteryx and the Neanderthal Man were front page headlines, but questions surrounding their authenticity barely make the papers. In the field of cosmology, Arno Penzias discovered the Cosmological Microwave Background (CMB) which formed the basis for the famous Bing Bang theory (BBT). Simply put, BBT says that once upon a time the universe was a zone of infinite density called singularity, but science is yet to explain the origin of singularity. This has not stopped the New Atheist from citing BBT as a plausible explanation for how the universe came to be.

It is not uncommon in listening to the New Atheist, to hear him continually conflate cause with mechanism. The assumption is that once we know how a thing works, we have resolved all questions regarding how it came to be. Cosmology tries to unravel the mechanism of our universe, and attempts to uncover evidence of its origin. In the process it has arrived at an irreducible truth that nothing ever comes from nothing. So it concluded that something cause the universe to be, which thing it labeled the First Cause. What they refer to as first cause, the Bible refers to as a very compassionate and wonderful God. Fred Hoyle, a scientist, admitted that cosmological data points to intelligent design when he observed the extreme fine-tuning required for the universe to emerge. He wrote: “the possibility of life evolving from a random process is slimmer than the possibility that a 747 can emerge from a hurricane running through a scrap field”. But in keeping with the atheist tradition, he ascribes the credit for creation to some unknown Intelligence. However, religion insists that this scientifically observable, yet unknown Intelligence is the God of the creation.

The Anthropic Principle attempts to explain the mystery of the fine-tuning required for the formation of the universe alluded to earlier. According to this principle, there may exist an infinite number of universes which we have never seen, or observed but our universe just happens, by random chance, to be the one with the correct configuration for life. Clever scientists have pointed out the irony of this principle. In accepting the existence of universes which we have no empirical evidence for, science was in essence embracing the metaphysical - the very thing that it criticizes in religion.

To broker a truce between science and religion, Stephen J Gould, one of the more marquee names in science, came up with the concept of Non-overlapping Magisteria (NOMA). This suggests that science and religion do not conflict, but rather deal with two mutually exclusive and non-overlapping questions - a truce that a Christian mind like Thomas Aquino would agree to. However the ever militant New Atheists such as Richard Dawkings, Sam Harris, Christopher Kruass etc., would have none of that. Their goal is not to advance learning, but to bury religion.

Now what do we Christians believe and why? We believe, and with ample evidence, that “by faith the world was made by God and the things that we see come from the things that we do not”. What evidence do we offer? First we offer the common experience of humanity which tells us that nothing has ever come from nothing.