Nobel laureate Arno Penzias, who helped make a key discovery supporting the Big Bang theory, has noted the obvious connection between its affirmation of a cosmic beginning and the concept of divine creation. This finding, supported by observational astronomy and theoretical physics, contradicts the expectations of scientific atheists, who long portrayed the universe as eternal and self-existent-and, therefore, in no need of an external creator.Įvidence for what scientists call the Big Bang has instead confirmed the expectations of traditional theists. We don’t know the materialistic answers for sure, but at least the scientific explanations are in principle testable, and there is some evidence behind them.įirst, scientists have discovered that the physical universe had a beginning. I’ll give alternative naturalistic explanations for each of the three “proofs of God”. They tell, Meyer says, “a decidedly God-friendly story”. ![]() This cannot be allowed to stand, and so Meyer goes back and recycles three old chestnuts that, he argues, points to a designer who just happens to be God. “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if, at bottom, there is no purpose, no design… nothing but blind, pitiless indifference,” Dawkins famously wrote. Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, Michael Shermer, the late Stephen Hawking, and others have published popular books arguing that science renders belief in God unnecessary or implausible. In recent years, many scientists have emerged as celebrity spokesmen for atheism. It’s easy to see why this perception has proliferated. It also showed that 65 percent of self-described atheists and 43 percent of agnostics believe “the findings of science make the existence of God less probable.” We found that scientific theories about the unguided evolution of life have, in particular, led more people to reject belief in God than worries about suffering, disease, or death. Perhaps surprisingly, our survey discovered that the perceived message of science has played a leading role in the loss of faith. Meyer blames this on atheistic scientists: Meyer begins by bemoaning the well-known decline in belief in God in America, which, as I noted recently, has fallen to 81% from 92% just 11 years ago. I’ll deal below with the features of the Universe, not mentioned by Meyer, that show how the Universe fails to conform to what we’d expect if there were a God. Otherwise it could confirm yet another supposition: the Xenu Hypothesis. Before you decide that an observation confirms the God Hypothesis instead of the Science (naturalistic) Hypothesis, you better show us that there’s a God that conforms to traditional belief. As the Discovery Institute used to say before its mask slipped, the Designer could be any form of unknown cosmic intelligence, including space aliens. Moreover, before we start accepting the God hypothesis-note that Meyer explicitly calls the Intelligent Designer “God”-he has (as Hitchens used to say) “all his work before him.” For even if the three examples pointed to an intelligence operating in the Universe, that doesn’t mean it’s God, much less the Christian God. ![]() Since that is most Americans, these books usually get high ratings and sell respectably.īut,in truth, Meyer’s “Discoveries” have been long known, and have been debunked insofar as there are more plausible, naturalistic, and non-Goddy explanations for all of them. ![]() They’re apparently the subject of his new book (published by HarperOne, the religious wing of Harper), Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Discoveries that Reveal the MInd Behind the Universe. If you go to its Amazon site, you find it highly lauded by those looking for any reason to believe in God. Meyer has managed to con the right-wingnuts at Newsweek into publishing the article below, which list three scientific discoveries that, says Meyer, point directly to God. and advancing the big mission of his employer, the Discovery Institute (he’s director of the Center for Science and Culture): debunking naturalism and materialism in favor of religion, preferably Christianity. Stephen Meyer is an intelligent-design creationist who has spent his career trying to squelch the teaching of evolution in the U.S.
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