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Does God Exist – the Rational Approach

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Does God Exist – the Rational Approach Against Atheism: The Case for God Written for the Rational Believer Toby Baxendale Published by Toby Baxendale [insert contact details] © 2017 Toby Baxendale Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Quotations marked NRSV are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. 2 Contents Foreword Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The (Not So) Brave New World Is a rapprochement between faith and reason possible? Do you have to have faith in something so obvious as the natural belief in the external world? Reason is faith cultivating itself 2. Faith and the Scientists An apostate scientist dares to suggest his community is faith based The great methodological misunderstandings of science Religion and science: enemies or allies? 3. Our Medieval, Dark Age, Primitive, Superstitious, Religious (Christian), Off-with-the-Fairies Ancestors! The widely held, inaccurate view of the history of science Our much-maligned pre-Enlightenment ancestors The two great scientists, Copernicus and Galileo: standing on the shoulders of their great ancient and medieval predecessors Confident denial or conceit wrapped up as wisdom? 4. The Surprising Friend of Theism: Evolutionary Method Evolution and the creative process Evolution 2.0 Who made God then? 5. The Current Canon of Science The ever-moving gospel of science Appearance and reality Space and time The timelessness of reality Time and physics Quantum wonderland Reconciling the Newtonian big and the quantum small Theories of big and small worlds 3 In the beginning, at time zero 6. Scientists and Philosophers: The God Debate Rages on Down the Centuries The curious case of Lee Smolin The one-man rock band of science: Lawrence Krauss Hume’s objections to the cosmological argument Kant’s objections to the cosmological argument Hume’s objections to the design argument Back to Krauss 7. On Being The oneness of reality The scale of forms On the matter of pure evil On the matter of pure goodness Postscript to pure being 8. Dawkins’ Delusion and Anselm’s Prayer Dawkins’ delusion Anselm’s ontological argument Objections to the ontological argument What God is and is not A reply on behalf of a fool 9. The Collingwood Versus Ryle Debate The a priori method Back to Collingwood vs Ryle The straw man Some final thoughts on the ontological argument 10. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and A.C. Grayling Dawkins and his creedal statements Daniel Dennett and his bizarre statements Grayling, the philosophical atheist The extreme intolerance of atheism 11. Alain de Botton and His Atheist Church The Eucharist Communal restaurants Ideal friends 4 Teaching and preaching Wisdom Temples to tenderness The School of Life 12. Secular Versus Religious Murder: A Silly Debate The Crusades The Spanish Inquisition Wars led by atheists Hitler Stalin Mass secular murder Mao Child sacrifice and the Bible Conclusion Appendix 1: The Body Count Appendix 2: A Great Misunderstanding in the Bible: Homosexuality Bibliography 5 Foreword Briefly, two things: Firstly, you will see that I have sometimes referred to ‘he’ when in fact I am addressing both male and female readers. I hope you will accept this in good faith, because it seems expedient, in the circumstances, rather than using the clumsier he/she or the ungrammatical ‘they’ when I am talking to ‘you’, whether singly or collectively. I have also tended to refer to God as ‘he’, which is normal practice in the Christian church. Secondly, please bear in mind that what follows isn’t written as an academic text and so I haven’t necessarily felt bound to follow citation practices to the letter, although all quoted sources are listed fully in the Bibliography. Acknowledgments To Dr Jane Taylor, who has read this work on many occasions and offered suggestions and some proofreading. Dr Kristin Argall, of Wordthreads Editing (www.wordthreads.com.au), has been of enormous editing assistance. To my wife Catherine, for her support in this project. To my colleague at the Legatum Institute, the historian Hywel Williams, for his review and comments. And to Professor J Guido Huslmann and his fellow professors and PhD students at the University of Angers who kindly took part in a seminar on two of my chapters. Also, I would like to thank our local priest, the Revd Dr David Munchin, for his reading of parts of this book as well as Canon Revd Alistair MacDonald-Radcliff for his helpful criticism. Introduction I would be willing to bet that the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two – though of course it may be replaced by a new consensus that is just as invalid. The human will to believe is inexhaustible. Thomas Nagel1 After selling my principal business at the very end of 2010, I had enough time for the great indulgence of reading and researching to understand why, in this universe, there is anything at all.2 This I call the big ‘why’ question. Most of the scientific community errs on the side of caution when trying to answer the ‘why anything’ question, on the basis that their discipline better suits them for answering the ‘how anything’ question. Yet the secular world is increasingly being influenced by champions of atheism that are often noted biologists and cosmologists who seek to answer this ‘why’ question by proposing that over a very long time period, a series of potentially improbable random events all came together at the right time to give rise to what we see around us. The Christian religion, which is my fundamental religious outlook, tells us this: God did it. In varying degrees of sophistication, theologians over several millennia have explored what this might mean. Philosophers have often been drawn to the same God-based conclusions, although there are many who decline to comment on the ‘why’ question or reject outright the notion of God as the reason behind the ‘why’. Philosophers seem to be much more relaxed in discussing the matter than scientists, who avoid the issue or condemn it as an illegitimate point of view. However, both the scientist and the philosopher will always attest that they are using their powers of reasoning to deliver their pronouncements and are therefore correct. Both cannot be fully right. 1 Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 128. 2 Most of my life I have had this nagging need to address this question. What motivated me to begin my research for this book was reading Professor David Conway’s The Rediscovery of Wisdom in the 2000s, which converted Professor Anthony Flew. Before the New Atheists arrived on the scene, Flew (There is a God) was the most sophisticated of atheism’s advocates. The moralising high priests of religion have been almost completely replaced by the moralising high priests of science. And, when it comes to answering the ‘why’ question, the latter, using dubious methods and speculation to arrive at their conclusions, have shown themselves to be a poor replacement for the hectoring preacher. While I approached the reading of their works in good faith and in as scholarly manner as I could, respecting their academic titles from world-renowned institutions, I found a staggering level of pretension on display. On the whole, their views are held without humility – in fact, I found I was not exploring a view point with them, but being told what to think in a deeply patronising manner. Their atheist ‘religion’ is an unthinking religion, and of the very worst kind. Yes, reader, it is a religion, as I hope you will discover in later chapters of this book. The scientist I challenge is the naturalist, reductionist, materialist scientist. I appreciate there are many other scientists who do not hold this view or conduct their science in this tradition. But for the sake of brevity, when I use the word ‘scientist’, it is invariably to discuss the views of such a naturalist, reductionist, materialist scientist and his atheist world view. I apologise in advance for any offence given to other scientists who do not share this view. Some theologians are happy to use their powers of reason to achieve some coherence between their faith and their understanding of the world around them, while others seem entirely comfortable with their beliefs and see no need to question the foundation of their faith. Some theologians and scientists will acknowledge that faith comes first and reason second. Because of my reading, I have come to see that I can only understand things through the lens of my faith in God – what I call the fundamental ground for being. This faith is absolutely presupposed, before I start to exercise my powers of reason on anything. Faith and reason overlap at the point where I hold a position of faith that then allows me to believe anything. The title of my book, Against Atheism, therefore argues against the atheist position that claims to have no faith. You, the reader, can judge whether I am ‘off with the fairies’, a phrase atheists are prone to using about people of religious faith, or actually onto something. Like St Augustine, who asserted ‘Believe in order that you may understand.’3 Or, like another great philosopher-theologian, St Anselm: ‘I do 3 Sermon 43:7–9. 9 not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand.’4 I also believe I can demonstrate that by using powers of plain, old-fashioned reasoning, you are actually more coherent in holding a religious (Christian) world view than an atheistic one.
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