"GOD: IS DIVINE EXISTENCE CREDIBLE?" BY DALLAS BURDETTE

First of all, I enjoyed this article if for no other reason than it exposed me to some of Alexander Campbell's thought. I was raised in the Campbellite tradition, but have to admit that I had never read any of his actual words before.

Secondly, I was pleased to see that several of the ideas in this paper echoed points that at the time I was planning to make in my series of talks on Answering Atheists (summarized in several earlier posts).  I spent a little time in that series on the question of where the belief in God came from. Freud attempted to explain that it was not created as a brand new concept outside of our natural senses, but came from the analogy of what we do know through our senses about human fathers. So although I will show that Freud did not have a foolproof argument, there certainly are ways to address Burdette's contention that there was no way mankind could have invented the idea. Another possibility is the more recent concept of the “God gene,” which could probably be used equally by atheists and Christians alike.

I did have a number of fundamental objections to the thrust of the paper. In the first place, it doesn't really concern the credibility of God's existence (as stated in the title) as much as it tries to PROVE His existence. All such attempts are doomed to failure, and I believe that was God's intent in the first place. As Peter Kreeft said (I'm paraphrasing), “God gave us just enough concrete evidence that we could turn to Him in faith, but not so much evidence that no faith was necessary.”

The major methodology used in the paper was the rightly criticized God of the Gaps argument. In other words, scientists can't presently explain A, B or C, therefore we can slip God into those holes in our present knowledge as proof of His existence. Here are two pertinent quotes regarding that approach, from an atheist and a Christian, respectively:

“If that's how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then your God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time goes on.” Neil deGrasse Tyson

“How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of our knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer

As a concrete example, up to a few year ago, I thought I had a fool-proof argument against the first step of evolution, pre-biotic evolution. As an organic research chemist, the most puzzling thing about animal life is that it is based almost entirely around left-handed amino acids. But I could think of no conceivable way that naturally-occurring racemic mixtures of right- and left- forms could be separated without divine intervention. By the way, this same argument is advanced by Dr. Walter Bradley in Lee Strobel's 2000 book The Case for Christ. Then I decided to canvass the chemical literature since 2000 and found four technical papers demonstrating several astonishingly unexpected ways that such separations could perhaps occur naturally. There was another gap almost filled in.

The apparently old argument against evolution based on the need to simultaneously form a male and female of each species does sound convincing. But I must admit that I know next to nothing about biology. However, to me it is incredible that such a seemingly simple and foolproof argument would exist without biologists addressing it early on. And since Burdette's misunderstanding of basic chemistry (p.10) and the physics of astronomy is fairly obvious, I really have little confidence in his biological arguments either.

Burdette sets up an either/or argument in which one must either be a young earth creationist or an atheist. If one is a theistic evolutionist, then one has rejected the Bible. This is the fallacy of the excluded middle (p. 11, 16). And it is entirely misguided to label evolution as merely a theory, and therefore just a philosophical and political stance (p. 12). Burdette, as well as many other non-scientists, obviously has no conception of what the term “theory” means in a scientific context. To be advanced beyond the status of a hypothesis to that of a theory means that it has been tested again and again and still proves to be the best explanation of the data after many years.

The anthropic argument, including the existence or non-existence of other populated planets, falls short of any sort of proof of God's existence in light of the probably numerous other planets in the universe having the right conditions for life. Atheists can, and have, argued that we just happen to be on one of the planets that by chance does have those conditions.

To demand that scientists totally abandon one of the basic underpinnings of science (which has been described as practical atheism, meaning the working assumption that no supernatural forces will interfere with one's experimentation, whether or not that possibility exists in reality) and replace it with a science derived directly from a particular "literal" understanding of the Bible (i.e., the Hebrew word yom can only mean a 24-hour day), opens up the door to the worst types of pseudo-science such as Creation Science and Flood Geology (p. 14).