Case Files The Expert Witnesses

Most criminal cases are built on the knowledgeable testimony of expert witnesses (trained spe- cialists who testify about specific, detailed attributes of evidence). This book was written in an attempt to introduce you to some of these important witnesses. The following experts are avail- able for further consultation as you continue to examine the evidence in God’s Crime Scene:

Chapter One In the Beginning: Was the Universe an Inside Job? Experts making the case from “inside the room”:

Alex Vilenkin Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes (Hill and Wang, 2006)

Stephen William Hawking The Universe in a Nutshell (Bantam, 2001)

Lawrence M. Krauss A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (Atria Books, 2013)

Experts making the case from “outside the room”:

William Lane Craig, with Quentin Smith and Paul Copan Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford University Press, 1995)

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Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time (Crossway, 2001) Creation Out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration (Baker Academic, 2004)

John Leslie and Robert Lawrence Kuhn (editors) The Mystery of Existence: Why Is There Anything at All? (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013)

Robert John Russell (editor) Physics, Philosophy, and Theology: A Common Quest for Understanding (University of Notre Dame Press, 1989)

Chapter Two Tampering with the Evidence: Who Is Responsible? Experts making the case from “inside the room”:

Leonard Susskind The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (Back Bay Books, 2006)

Paul Davies The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? (Mariner Books, 2008)

Victor Stenger The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us (Prometheus Books, 2011)

Experts making the case from “outside the room”:

Neil A. Manson (Editor) God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science (Routledge, 2003) The Expert Witnesses 281

Alister E. McGrath A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology (Westminster John Knox Press, 2009)

Hugh Ross The Creator and the Cosmos (NavPress, 2001)

Chapter Three The Origin of Life: Does the Text Require an Author? Experts making the case from “inside the room”:

Paul Davies The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life (Simon & Schuster, 1999)

Paul F. Lurquin The Origins of Life and the Universe (Columbia University Press, 2003)

Pekka Teerikorpi, Mauri Valtonen, Kirsi Lehto, Harry Lehto, Gene Byrd, and Arthur Chernin The Evolving Universe and the Origin of Life: The Search for Our Cosmic Roots (Springer, 2008)

Experts making the case from “outside the room”:

Stephen C. Meyer Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperOne, 2009)

Werner Gitt, Bob Compton, and Jorge Fernandez Without Excuse (Creation Book Publishers, 2011) 282 god’s crime scene

Edgar Andrews Who Made God? Searching for a Theory of Everything (Evangelical Press, 2012)

Chapter Four Signs of Design: Is There Evidence of an Artist? Experts making the case from “inside the room”:

Richard Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (W. W. Norton, 1996)

Robert T. Pennock Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives (MIT Press, 2001)

Michael Shermer Why Darwin Matters: The Case against Intelligent Design (Holt, 2007)

Experts making the case from “outside the room”:

Michael J. Behe Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (Free Press, 2006)

William A. Dembski The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Fazale Rana The Cell’s Design: How Chemistry Reveals the Creator’s Artistry (Baker Books, 2008) The Expert Witnesses 283

Chapter Five Our Experience of Consciousness: Are We More Than Matter? Experts making the case from “inside the room”:

Paul M. Churchland Matter and Consciousness (MIT Press, 2013)

David J. Chalmers The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford University Press, 1997)

Thomas Nagel Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist, Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford University Press, 2012)

Experts making the case from “outside the room”:

Edward Feser Philosophy of Mind (Oneworld, 2005)

J. P. Moreland Consciousness and the Existence of God: A Theistic Argument (Routledge, 2008)

Joel B. Green and Stuart L. Palmer (editors) In Search of the Soul: Four Views of the Mind-Body Problem (InterVarsity, 2005)

Chapter Six Free Will or Full Wiring: Are Real Choices Even Possible? Experts making the case from “inside the room”: 284 god’s crime scene

John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, and Manuel Vargas Four Views on Free Will (Blackwell, 2007)

Michael S. Gazzaniga Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (HarperCollins, 2011)

Sam Harris Free Will (Free Press, 2012)

Experts making the case from “outside the room”:

Richard Swinburne Mind, Brain, and Free Will (Oxford University Press, 2013)

Saint Augustine of Hippo On Free Choice of the Will (Hackett, 1993)

Roderick Chisholm Human Freedom and the Self (Lindley Lecture) (University of Kansas Department of Philosophy, 1964) “Human Freedom and the Self” in Free Will (ed. Robert Kane; Blackwell, 2002)

Chapter Seven Law and Order: Is Morality More Than an Opinion? Experts making the case from “inside the room”:

Christopher Boehm Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame (Basic Books, 2012)

Dennis L. Krebs The Origins of Morality: An Evolutionary Account (Oxford University Press, 2011) The Expert Witnesses 285

Sam Harris The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (Free Press, 2010)

Experts making the case from “outside the room”:

David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (Oxford University Press, 2011)

John E. Hare God and Morality: A Philosophical History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)

Keith Ward Morality, Autonomy, and God (Oneworld, 2013)

Chapter Eight The Evidence of Evil: Can God and Evil Coexist? Experts arguing against a suspect “outside the room”:

Bart D. Ehrman God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question— Why We Suffer (HarperCollins, 2009)

Theodore M. Drange Nonbelief and Evil: Two Arguments for the Nonexistence of God (Prometheus Books, 1998)

Daniel Howard-Snyder (editor) The Evidential Problem from Evil (Indiana University Press, 1996) 286 god’s crime scene

Experts arguing for a suspect “outside the room”:

C. S. Lewis The Problem of Pain (HarperOne, 2001)

N. T. Wright Evil and the Justice of God (InterVarsity, 2006)

Peter van Inwagen The Problem of Evil (Oxford University Press, 2008) Case Files The Investigative Notes

Most criminal investigations result in hundreds of pages of notes written by detectives who chronicle their discoveries prior to writing the supplemental reports and search warrants required to file a case with the district attorney. Not everything learned in the course of an investigation ends up in these final documents. That’s why the detective’s case notes eventually become part of the evidential record. The following notes were created as part of the investiga- tion leading to the writing of God’s Crime Scene:

Chapter 1: In the Beginning 1. The relationship between matter and energy was established most famously by Albert Einstein in 1905. Einstein described the mass-energy equivalence with the equation E = mc2. For the purposes of this book, when I use the expression “space, time, and matter,” I am also including energy as a matter equivalent, just as Einstein described. 2. Mathematicians and philosophers recognize the linguistic problem arising when we compare infinite quanti- ties in this way. Georg Cantor established “rules” for such comparisons, redefining terms related to “equal,” “larger,” or “smaller” amounts (for example, “larger” infinite sets are typically described as “stronger” infinites). But these new definitions and rules don’t eliminate the absurdities we recognize when evaluating such quanti- ties. Instead, attempts to redefine these terms reflect our strong intuitions related to notions of addition and subtraction and concepts of “larger and smaller.” It’s reasonable for us to ask for substantial evidence before jettisoning these intuitions. 3. For an extensive survey of the problems related to actual infinites, refer to William Lane Craig’s excellent books, including Reasonable Faith; Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology; and Creation Out of Nothing. 4. George Gamow, My World Line: An Informal Autobiography (New York: Viking, 1970), 44. 5. As Alex Rosenberg wrote, “The universe started in a highly improbable state—an incredibly hot, highly energetic sphere smaller than a Ping-Pong ball—and then expanded into a ball that was no bigger than an orange when it was a millionth of a second old and has been spreading out ever since” (The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions [New York: W. W. Norton, 2011], 34).

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6. Paolo Saraceno, Beyond the Stars: Our Origins and the Search for Life in the Universe (Singapore: World Scientific, 2012), 26. 7. As astrophysicist Andrew Liddle and astronomer Jon Loveday affirmed, “The standard cosmological model is a striking success, as a phenomenological description of the cosmological data.… The model’s success in explaining high-precision observations has led a clear majority of the cosmological community to accept it as a good account of how the Universe works” (Oxford Companion to Cosmology [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 8). 8. In 1993, Vilenkin partnered with Borde to write a paper entitled “Eternal Inflation and the Initial Singularity.” The purpose of their paper was to show an infinite past “is in fact not possible in future-eternal inflationary spacetimes as long as they obey some reasonable physical conditions. Such models must necessarily possess ini- tial singularities; i.e., the inflationary universe must have had a beginning” (emphasis mine). Vilenkin continued his examination of the origin of the universe and in 2001 published a scientific paper with Borde and Guth entitled “Inflation Is Not Past-Eternal.” This paper was particularly important, as it proposed a hypothesis known as the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem. This theorem uses a “simple kinematical argument, without assuming any energy condition, that a cosmological model that is inflating—or just expanding sufficiently fast—must be incomplete in null and timelike past directions” (Borde and Vilenkin, “Eternal Inflation and the Initial Singularity,” November 23, 1993, Institute of Cosmology, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Tufts University, http://arXiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9312022v1; and Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin, “Inflationary Spacetimes Are Incomplete in Past Directions,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 151301 [2003] [gr-qc/0110012]). 9. Vilenkin extended his examination of the alternative explanations and wrote a paper with Mithani in 2012 entitled “Did the Universe Have a Beginning?” Mithani and Vilenkin examined the explanations we’ve already discussed: “Three candidate scenarios which seem to allow the possibility that the universe could have existed forever with no initial singularity: eternal inflation, cyclic evolution, and the emergent universe.” Here’s what they concluded: Not only does Vilenkin’s work address (and eliminate) all the eternal inflation, cyclical, and emergent models we’ve already examined, but it also excludes any future proposals in which the expansion of the universe is acknowledged. According to Vilenkin and Mithani, “The first two of these scenarios are geodesically incomplete to the past, and thus cannot describe a universe without a beginning. The third, although it is stable with respect to classical perturbations, can collapse quantum mechanically, and therefore cannot have an eternal past” (Institute of Cosmology, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Tufts University, April 20, 2012, arXiv:1204.4658v1 [hep-th]). 10. To be fair, some physicists disagree with Vilenkin on this issue. In fact, Guth (Vilenkin’s coauthor in two papers I’ve already cited) holds a contrary position. If nothing else, the lack of consensus here, even when theories are allegedly supported by mathematical or physical evidences, indicates the challenge facing those who seek a definitive naturalistic explanation for the origin of the universe. 11. To be sure, both theists and atheists are looking for an infinite, uncaused cause of the universe. The only ques- tion is whether this infinite, uncaused cause is impersonal (like the primordial vacuum described by naturalists The Investigative Notes 289

in this chapter) or personal (as described by the evidence in the chapters to come). While material naturalism cannot explain actual infinites (without the absurdities described in this chapter), supernaturalism would not be limited in this regard. In fact, one could argue the infinite nature of the uncaused cause of the universe is a defining distinction available only if this cause lies outside the realm of the spatial, temporal, and material universe. 12. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Nature and Grace,” in Leibniz: Philosophical Essays (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2013), Kindle ebook location 5514–5517. 13. Cosmologist Sean Carroll agrees with the pointlessness of asking why questions if the first cause of the universe is an impersonal force of physics. In his article “A Universe from Nothing?” he said why questions related to the universe “are interesting questions to ask, and none of them is addressed by modern physics or cosmology. Or at least, they are interesting questions to ‘raise,’ but my own view is that the best answer is to promptly un-ask them.” He further wrote, “It’s okay to admit that a chain of explanations might end somewhere, and that somewhere might be with the universe and the laws it obeys, and the only further explanation might be ‘that’s just the way it is’” (Preposterous Universe [blog], April 28, 2012, www.preposterousuniverse.com/ blog/2012/04/28/a-universe-from-nothing/). 14. Paul Davies, “The Birth of the Cosmos,” in God, Cosmos, Nature, and Creativity, ed. Jill Gready (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1995), 8–9.

Chapter 1: Secondary Investigation 1. For a much more complete description of their model of imaginary time, refer to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. 2. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1998), 138–39. 3. “Hubble Pinpoints Distant Supernovae,” Hubble Site, January 8, 1998, accessed April 14, 2015, http://hubble- site.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1998/02/text/. 4. This model was developed by physicists Paul teinhardtS and Neil Turok. For more information, refer to their Endless Universe. 5. This model is dependent on the Horava-Witten version of string theory, a highly controversial and speculative theoretical physics framework lacking evidential confirmation. For more on string theory, see chapter 2’s Secondary Investigation. 6. For an excellent, accessible summary of the problems with the Cyclic Ekpyrotic model, refer to Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, Creation Out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 238–40. For a more academic examination of the liabilities, see Gary Felder, Andrei Frolov, Lev Kofman, and Andrei Linde, “Cosmology with Negative Potentials,” Cornell University Library, February 16, 2002, http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0202017. 7. Andrei Linde, “Cyclic Universe Runs into Criticism,” Physics World (June 2002): 8. 290 god’s crime scene

8. Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: tringS Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (New York: Back Bay Books, 2006), 90–91. 9. The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, June 21, 2012. 10. Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (New York: Atria Books, 2013), Kindle ebook location 2029.

Chapter 2: Tampering with the Evidence 1. As Arizona State University cosmologist Paul Davies said, “One of the most significant facts—arguably the most significant fact—about the universe is that we are part of it” (The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? [Boston: Mariner Books, 2008], 2). 2. Davies, Goldilocks Enigma, 191. Oxford philosopher John Leslie described it this way: “It looks as if our universe is spectacularly ‘fine-tuned for Life.’ By this I mean only that it looks as if small changes in this universe’s basic features would have made life’s evolution impossible” (Universes [London: Routledge, 1996], 2–3). 3. For a complete list of fine-tuned properties elatedr to the universe, our solar system, and Earth, refer to John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2001). I’ve summarized their work with additional references. 4. Stephen Hawking said the laws of physics “appear fine-tuned in the sense that if they erew altered by only modest amounts, the universe would be qualitatively different, and in many cases unsuitable for the development of life.… The emergence of the complex structures capable of supporting intelligent observers seems to be very fragile. The laws of nature form a system that is extremely fine-tuned, and very little in physical law can be altered without destroying the possibility of the development of life as we know it. Were it not for a series of startling coincidences in the precise details of physical law, it seems, humans and similar life-forms would never have come into being” (Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design [New York: Bantam Books, 2010], 160–61). 5. Stanford University physicist and cosmologist Leonard Susskind said, “The Laws of Physics begin with a list of elementary particles like electrons, quarks, and photons, each with special properties such as mass and electric charge. These are the objects that everything else is built out of. No one knows why the list is what it is or why the properties of these particles are exactly what they are. An infinite number of other lists are equally possible. But a universe filled with life is by no means a generic expectation” (The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design [New York: Back Bay Books, 2006], 8–9). 6. Susskind said, “The large-scale properties of the universe—its size; how fast it grows, the existence of galaxies, stars, and planets—are mainly governed by the force of gravity.… The properties of gravity, especially its strength, could easily have been different. In fact it is an unexplained miracle that gravity is as weak as it is” (Cosmic Landscape, 9). The Investigative Notes 291

7. Some physicists argue the mass density of the universe is simply the consequence of cosmic “inflation.” ccordingA to inflation theory, the universe experienced a period of rapid expansion from 10−35 to 10−34 seconds after its origin. This theory explains the mass density as a simple consequence of this inflationary process. But this explanation, even if it is true, fails to negate the need for fine-tuning. The inflation mechanism itself would have to be fine-tuned in order to account for the mass-density parameters I’ve described in this chapter. 8. “In the beginning there were only hydrogen and helium: certainly not sufficient for the foundation of life. Carbon, oxygen, and all the others came later. They were formed in the nuclear reactors in the interiors of stars. But the ability of stars to transmute hydrogen and helium into the all-important carbon nuclei was a very delicate affair. Small changes in the laws of electricity and nuclear physics could have prevented the formation of carbon” (Susskind, Cosmic Landscape, 10). 9. Ross, Creator and the Cosmos, 115. 10. Refer to Lee Strobel’s interview with Robin Collins in The Case for a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points toward God (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004), 131–32. 11. John Jefferson Davis, “Theesign D Argument, Cosmic ‘Fine-Tuning,’ and the Anthropic Principle,” The International Journal of Philosophy of Religion 22 (1987): 140. 12. Hugh Ross, Why the Universe Is the Way It Is (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2008), 35–36. 13. Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds: A Journey through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 247. 14. Physicist and Caltech astronomer Hugh Ross observed, “In elliptical galaxies star formation ceases before the interstellar medium becomes enriched enough with heavy elements.… The problem with large irregular galaxies is they have active nuclei. These nuclei spew out life-destroying radiation and material. Meanwhile, most small irregular galaxies have insufficient quantities of the heavy elements essential for life” (Creator and the Cosmos, 177). 15. “The presence of the planet Jupiter in our solar system is a fortuitous one for life on Earth, because its immense gravity helps to fling asteroids into outer space. If Jupiter were much smaller and its gravity much weaker, then our solar system would still be full of the debris of asteroids and comets left over from its creation” (Kaku, Parallel Worlds, 243). 16. “Computer programs show that without a large Moon (about a third the size of the Earth), Earth’s axis might have shifted by as much as 90 degrees.… (The moons of Mars are not large enough to stabilize its spin. As a result, Mars is slowly beginning to enter another era of instability. In the past, astronomers believe, Mars might have wobbled on its axis by as much as 45 degrees)” (Kaku, Parallel Worlds, 243). 17. Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe (New York: Copernicus Books, 2003), 222. 18. Paul Davies, “TheAppearance of Design in Physics and Cosmology,” in God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science, ed. Neil A. Manson (London: Routledge, 2003), 152. 292 god’s crime scene

19. “In this multiverse of universes, most universes are dead. The proton is not stable. Atoms never condense. DNA never forms. The universe collapses prematurely or freezes almost immediately. But in our universe, a series of cosmic accidents has happened, not necessarily because of the hand of God but because of the law of averages” (Kaku, Parallel Worlds, 249). 20. “In an eternal multiverse with an unlimited number of baby universes, one just like ours is likely to occur” (Victor J. Stenger, The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us [Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011], 231). 21. Arno Penzias, “Creation Is Supported by All the Data So Far,” in Cosmos, Bios, and Theos, ed. Henry Margenau and Roy Abraham Varghese (Peru, IL: Open Court, 1992), 78.

Chapter 2: Secondary Investigation 1. Particle physicist Victor Stenger argued, “To defeat the fine-tuning argument, I do not have to give a reason why each parameter has the value it does, I must only show that life could be plausible under a wide range of parameters” (The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us [Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011], 173). 2. Stenger, Fallacy of Fine-Tuning, 72. 3. Alex Vilenkin put it this way: “Our presence in the universe depends on a precarious balance between different tendencies—a balance that would be destroyed if the constants of nature were to deviate significantly from their present values” (Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes [New York: Hill and Wang, 2007], Kindle ebook location 2034). 4. Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” in Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 20 (September 1982): 16. 5. “A common response [to the appearance of fine-tuning] was to shrug the matter aside with the comment ‘The value it has is the value it has, and if it had been different, we wouldn’t be here to worry about it.’ But that attitude seems a bit unsatisfactory. We can certainly imagine a universe in which the form of the strong force law [holding together the subatomic particles in the nuclei of atoms] is the same but the actual strength of the force is different, just as we can imagine a world in which gravity is a little stronger or weaker but otherwise obeys the same laws. The fact that the value of the strong and electromagnetic forces in atomic nuclei are ‘just right’ for life (like Goldilocks’ porridge) cries out for explanation” (Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? [Boston: Mariner Books, 2008], 138). 6. “How much chance can we buy in scientific explanation? neO measure of what is involved can be given in terms of coin flipping: odds of 10120 to one is like getting heads no fewer than four hundred times in a row. If the existence of life in the universe is completely independent of the big fix mechanism—if it’s just a coin- cidence—then those are the odds against our being here. That level of flukiness seems too much to swallow” (Davies, Goldilocks Enigma, 150). The Investigative Notes 293

7. Paul Davies said, “There is not a shred of evidence that the Universe is logically necessary. Indeed, as a theoreti- cal physicist I find it rather easy to imagine alternative universes that are logically consistent, and therefore equal contenders of reality” (“The Appearance of Design in Physics and Cosmology,” in God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science, ed. Neil A. Manson [London: Routledge, 2003], 148–49). 8. As theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss said, “Put another way, it is not too surprising to find that we live in a universe in which we can live!” (A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing [New York: Atria Books, 2013], Kindle ebook location 1690). 9. Leonard Susskind lamented, “String Theory has no lack of enemies who will tell you it is a monstrous perversion.… Some (certainly not all) high energy experimental physicists … are annoyed that the new phenomena implied by String Theory are too remote from experiment.… These physicists are troubled because they can’t see how their experiments can ever address the questions that string theorists are trying to answer” (The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design [New York: Back Bay Books, 2006], 126). 10. Michio Kaku wrote, “In this multiverse of universes, most universes are dead. The proton is not stable. Atoms never condense. DNA never forms. The universe collapses prematurely or freezes almost immediately. But in our universe, a series of cosmic accidents has happened, not necessarily because of the hand of God but because of the law of averages” (Parallel Worlds: A Journey through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos [New York: Anchor Books, 2005], 249). 11. As Victor Stenger observed, “In an eternal multiverse with an unlimited number of baby universes, one just like ours is likely to occur” (Fallacy of Fine-Tuning, 231). 12. Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One, Kindle ebook location 2813. 13. Paul Davies acknowledged the validity of this complaint: “This objection has some force. The claim that our universe is accompanied by countless others looks impossible to check” (Goldilocks Enigma, 172). 14. Davies again: “Prominent scientists and commentators have used words such as fantasy, virus, and intellectually bankrupt on their denunciations.… For those theoretical physicists hard at work trying to formulate a unique final theory, the multiverse comes across as a cheap way out.… Randomness plus observer selection strikes many physicists as an ugly and impoverished explanation compared with an overarching mathematical theory that pins down the properties of the world with quantitative precision and interweaves them into harmonious unity” (Goldilocks Enigma, 170–71). 15. Richard Swinburne, “The Argument to God from Fine-Tuning Reassessed,” in God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science, ed. Neil A. Manson (London: Routledge, 2003), 117–18. 16. Stephen Hawking said, “The problem is, for our theoretical models of inflation to work, the initial state of the universe had to be set up in a very special and highly improbable way. Thus traditional inflation theory resolves one set of issues but creates another—the need for a very special initial state” (Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design [New York: Bantam Books, 2010], 130–31). 294 god’s crime scene

17. Alex Vilenkin described the dilemma this way: “There is no matter and no space in this eryv peculiar state. Also, there is no time.… In the absence of space and matter, time is impossible to define. And yet, the state of ‘nothing’ cannot be identified with absolute nothingness” (Many Worlds in One, Kindle ebook location 2804). 18. Alan Guth, quoted in BBC-TV’s Parallel Universes, 2002. 19. Davies, Goldilocks Enigma, 178. 20. Referring to the movie The atrixM . 21. Paul Davies also lamented the absurdity of the multiverse in this regard: “Once we are prepared to entertain the possibility of a multiverse, there seems to be no good reason to rule out universes that contain computer simulations of other universes.… These wacky ideas might have remained restricted to the confines of esoteric philosophy classes if the multiverse theory hadn’t risen to prominence. By its very nature, the multiverse chal- lenges our understanding of what is real and what is imaginary” (Goldilocks Enigma, 180, 183). 22. Krauss, Universe from Nothing, Kindle ebook location 1891. 23. Krauss, Universe from Nothing, Kindle ebook location 2319.

Chapter 3: The Origin of Life 1. Paul Davies lamented, “In spite of spectacular progress over the past few decades in molecular biology and biochemistry, scientists still don’t know for sure how life began. The outline of a theory is available, but we are a long way from having a blow-by-blow account of the processes that transformed matter into life. Even the exact location of the incubator remains a frustrating mystery. It could be that life didn’t originate on Earth at all; it may have come here from space” (The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999], 26). 2. Leslie E. Orgel, “The Origin of Life: A Review of Facts and Speculations,” Trends in Biochemical Sciences 23, no. 12 (1998): 491. 3. Davies wrote, “Each cell is packed with tiny structures that might have come straight from an engineer’s manual. Minuscule tweezers, scissors, pumps, motors, levers, valves, pipes, chains, and even vehicles abound.… The various components fit together to form a smoothly functioning whole, like an elaborate factory production line.… At the level of individual atoms, life is anarchy—blundering, purposeless chaos. Yet, somehow, col- lectively, these unthinking atoms get it together and perform the dance of life with exquisite precision” (Fifth Miracle, 97–98). 4. Davies wrote, “Science rejects true miracles. Although biogenesis strikes many as virtually miraculous, the start- ing point of any scientific investigation must be the assumption that life emerged naturally, via a sequence of normal physical processes. It is very unlikely that we will ever find out exactly what happened, but we might be able to deduce a plausible chemical pathway leading from simple chemicals to life” (Fifth Miracle, 81–82). 5. Gerald Rau, Mapping the Origins Debate: Six Models of the Beginning of Everything (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2012), 85. The Investigative Notes 295

6. Davies wrote, “The protein is now assembled, but it doesn’t remain strung out like a snake. Instead it rolls up into a knobby ball, rather like a piece of elastic that’s stretched and allowed to snap back. This folding process may take some seconds, and it is still something of a mystery how the protein attains the appropriate final shape. If it is to work properly, the three-dimensional form of the protein has to be correct, with the bumps and cavities in all the right places, and the right atoms facing outwards” (Fifth Miracle, 107). 7. Gerald Rau described it this way: “Enzymes lower the energy needed to build molecules by holding the reactants together in a favorable configuration. Without this, the rate is very slow. The problem is that the enzymes themselves are proteins, very specific arrangements of amino acids. How did the first enzymes form without other enzymes to assist in the process?” (Mapping the Origins Debate, 87). 8. Davies, Fifth Miracle, 124. 9. “Origin-of-life researchers cannot identify any location on primordial Earth suitable for production of pre-biotic molecules. Those studying the problems cannot explain how the uniform ‘handedness’ (homochi- rality) of amino acids, nucleotides, and sugars could emerge in any so-called pre-biotic soup” (Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross, Origins of Life: Biblical and Evolutionary Models Face Off [Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2004], 26–27). 10. Robert Jastrow and biologist Michael Rampino observed, “The intense bombardment that accompanied the origin of the planet would surely have melted Earth’s surface and vaporized its early oceans. Yet we have geochemical evidence that life may have existed on Earth [very early].… It now appears likely that the first living creatures on Earth evolved spontaneously out of the inert chemicals that were common on the planet in the early years of its existence” (Origins of Life in the Universe [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008], 267). 11. For more information related to the surprising, early emergence of life, see J. William Schopf’s Cradle of Life: The Discovery of Earth’s Earliest Fossils. 12. Paul Davies conceded, “Unfortunately, before Darwinian evolution can start, a certain minimum level of com- plexity is required. But how was this initial complexity achieved? When pressed, most scientists wring their hands and mutter the incantation ‘Chance.’ So, did chance alone create the first self-replicating molecule?” (Fifth Miracle, 138). 13. Paul Davies wrote, “A small protein may typically contain a hundred amino acids of twenty varieties. There are about 10130 (which is one followed by 130 zeroes) different arrangements of the amino acids in a molecule of this length. Hitting the right one by accident would be no mean feat” (Fifth Miracle, 91). 14. Davies again: “Life as we know it requires hundreds of thousands of specialist proteins, not to mention the nucleic acids. The odds against producing just the proteins by pure chance are something like 1040000 to 1” (Fifth Miracle, 95). 15. Klaus Dose, the president of the Institute of Biochemistry at the University of Johannes Gutenberg, said it has become “abundantly clear that the power of self-organization inherent in macromolecules synthesized in cells 296 god’s crime scene

is based on extremely subtle physical and chemical, and particularly stereochemical, properties [that] have never been observed in this highly organized form in pre-biotic molecules.… It appears that the field has now reached a stage of stalemate” (“The Origin of Life: More Questions Than Answers,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 13 [1988]: 348–49). 16. Davies, Fifth Miracle, 141. 17. Werner Gitt, Bob Compton, and Jorge Fernandez, Without Excuse (Atlanta: Creation Book Publishers, 2011), 39–63. 18. Davies, Fifth Miracle, 255. 19. Cambridge-educated philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer wrote, “The first self-replicating RNA molecules themselves would have needed to be sequence-specific in order to perform the function of replication, which is a prerequisite of both natural selection and any further evolution toward cellular complexity” (Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design [New York: HarperOne, 2009], 313). 20. Nobel Prize–winning biophysical chemist Manfred Eigen recognized this challenge when he said, “Our task is to find an algorithm, a natural law that leads to the origin of information” (Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitsch, Steps towards Life: A Perspective on Evolution, trans. Paul Woolley [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], 12). 21. Stephen C. Meyer wrote, “Proposals that merely transfer the information problem elsewhere necessarily fail because they assume the existence of the very entity—specified information—they are trying to explain. And new laws will never explain the origin of information, because the processes that laws describe necessarily lack the complexity that informative sequences require. To say otherwise betrays confusion about the nature of scientific laws, the nature of information, or both” (Signature in the Cell, 268). 22. Stephen C. Meyer observed: “There are neither bonds nor bonding affinities—differing in strength or otherwise—that can explain the origin of the base sequencing that constitutes the information in the DNA molecule” (Signature in the Cell, 243). 23. As Paul Davies lamented, “We are still left with the mystery of where biological information comes from.… If the normal laws of physics can’t inject information, and if we are ruling out miracles, then how can life be predetermined and inevitable rather than a freak accident? How is it possible to generate random complexity and specificity together in a lawlike manner? We always come back to that basic paradox” (Fifth Miracle, 258). 24. Werner Gitt summarized it this way: “A necessary requirement for generating meaningful information is the ability to select from alternatives and this requires an intelligent, volitional entity.… Unguided, random processes cannot do this—not in any amount of time—because this selection process demands continuous guidance by intelligent beings that have a purpose” (Without Excuse, 50–51). 25. Franklin M. Harold, The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms, and the Order of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 251. The Investigative Notes 297

Chapter 3: Secondary Investigation 1. Astronomers Jeffrey Bennett and Seth Shostak admitted, “We now know that the methane and ammonia mixture in the original Miller-Urey experiment was not representative of Earth’s early atmosphere, so the experiment’s specific results probably don’t tell us a lot about what happened on the early Earth” (Life in the Universe [Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2006], 200). 2. Molecular bioscience professor Paul Lurquin said, “The wave of optimism that followed the Miller experiment in 1953 has been replaced today by more subdued attitudes. Solving the mysteries of the emergence of life on Earth is now seen as a very difficult proposition” (The Origins of Life and the Universe [New York: Columbia University Press, 2003], 154). 3. University of London professor of materials Edgar Andrews observed, “Not only would amino acids have to link together to form protein chains but at the same time and place, nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA) would also have to link together into polymer chains, again in the presence of water. But water works against chain formation in both proteins and nucleic acids, so that such molecules could only be built from scratch if a variety of highly specific catalysts just happened to be conveniently on hand. In short, the chance creation of proteins and DNA invokes extremely implausible chemistry” (Who Made God? Searching for a Theory of Everything [Carlisle, PA: Evangelical Press, 2012], 198). 4. As biochemist Fazale Rana explained, “Oxygen’s presence, either in the atmosphere or dissolved in oceanic or subterranean water, shuts down pre-biotic chemistry pathways. Even minute amounts of oxygen will prevent pre-biotic chemistry” (Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross, Origins of Life: Biblical and Evolutionary Models Face Off [Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2004], 101). 5. Fazale Rana wrote, “Therefore, either way, in the presence of oxygen or in the absence of oxygen the soup is ruined because pre-biotic molecule formation is stymied” (Rana and Ross, Origins of Life, 101). 6. Paleontologist Simon Conway Morris wrote, “The net result of this programme was effectively a catalogue of disasters, and although there were local successes Keefe and Miller were forced to conclude that none of the new processes they had investigated would be ‘sufficiently robust to have been of importance in the pre-biotic ocean’” (Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 48, citing Anthony Keefe and Stanley Miller, “Potentially Pre-Biotic Syntheses of Condensed Phosphates,” in Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere 26 [1996]: 15–25). 7. Fazale Rana wrote, “The synthesis of an RNA or DNA strand that consists of right-handed ribose or deoxyribose is stymied by the presence of the same sugar in the left-handed configuration (and vice versa). Also, one wrong-handed amino acid incorporated in a protein is enough to disrupt the folding of the protein, thereby blocking its capacity to function. Moreover, without homochirality, genetic material cannot copy itself. Two complementary strands of DNA cannot bind with each other into the crucial double helix structure unless all the nucleotides are of the same handedness” (Rana and Ross, Origins of Life, 124). 298 god’s crime scene

8. Paul Davies said, “Unless a way could be found for nature to create a soup with molecules of only one handed- ness, spontaneous RNA synthesis would be a lost cause” (The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999], 131). 9. For more information related to carbon and nitrogen ratios, see Rana and Ross, Origins of Life, 104. 10. Simon Conway Morris described it this way: “They will use reagents that are conveniently free of impurities, ones that are made available by processes that in turn rely on complex industrial pathways, and are often used in concentrations that in any pre-biotic milieu seem improbable.… It is very seldom that more than a passing remark is offered as to whether any environment on the early Earth … even approximates to what is going on in the laboratory” (Life’s Solution, 58). 11. For more information, see Stanley L. Miller and Jeffrey L. Bada, “Submarine Hot Springs and the Origin of Life,” Nature 344 (1988): 609–11; and Matthew Levy and Stanley L. Miller, “The Stability of the RNA Bases: Implications for the Origin of Life,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 95 (1998): 7933–38. 12. For more information, see Vincent Moulton et al., “RNA Folding Argues against a Hot-Start Origin of Life,” Journal of Molecular Evolution 51 (2000): 416–21. 13. For more information, see Thomas Lindahl, “Irreversible Heat Inactivation of Transfer Ribonucleic Acid,” Journal of Biological Chemistry 242 (1967): 1970–73. 14. For more information, see Philippe Lopez et al., “The Root of the Tree of Life in the Light of the Covarion Model,” Journal of Molecular Evolution 49 (1999): 496–506; Hervé Philippe and Patrick Forterre, “The Rooting of the Universal Tree of Life Is Not Reliable,” Journal of Molecular Evolution 49 (1999): 509–23; Henner Brinkmann and Hervé Philippe, “Archaea Sister Group of Bacteria? Indications from Tree Reconstruction Artifacts in Ancient Phylogenies,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 16 (1999): 817–25; Céline Brochier and Hervé Philippe, “A Non-Hyperthermophilic Ancestor for Bacteria,” Nature 417 (2002): 244; and Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, “Evolved RNA Secondary Structure and the Rooting of the Universal Tree of Life,” Journal of Molecular Evolution 54 (2002): 333–45. 15. Paul Lurquin observed, “Panspermia is possible only if (a) spores can be ejected from another planet and resist the acceleration and heat produced in the escape process, (b) spores can tolerate space travel for perhaps long periods of time, and (c) spores can survive the reentry process into Earth’s atmosphere” (Origins of Life and the Universe, 156). 16. Rana and Ross, Origins of Life, 99. 17. Paul Davies: “[Saying life began in outer space is] a bit of a cheat. It tries to dodge the problem of life’s origin by shifting the problem off into space and back in time until it disappears entirely from view. Although there is nothing logically wrong with the theory that life and the universe have always existed, it offers no explanation for either. You don’t explain something simply by declaring that it has always been there” (Fifth Miracle, 249). The Investigative Notes 299

Chapter 4: Signs of Design 1. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 1. 2. Robert Dorit, “Biological Complexity,” in Scientists Confront Intelligent Design and Creationism, ed. Andrew J. Petto and Laurie R. Godfrey (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 244. 3. Dawkins, Blind Watchmaker, 21. 4. Fazale Rana, The Cell’s Design: How Chemistry Reveals the Creator’s Artistry (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2008), 66–67, referencing Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross, Origins of Life: Biblical and Evolutionary Models Face Off (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2004), 159–68. 5. According to biochemist Michael Denton, cooperative, interactive cellular factories appear purposefully designed: “That each constituent utilized by the cell for a particular biological role, each cog in the watch, turns out to be the only and at the same time the ideal candidate for its role is particularly suggestive of design. That the whole, the end to which all this teleological wizardry leads—the living cell—should be also ideally suited for the task of constructing the world of multicellular life reinforces the conclusion of purposeful design. The prefabrication of parts to a unique end is the very hallmark of design. Moreover, there is simply no way that such prefabrication could be the result of natural selection” (Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe [New York: Free Press, 1998], 233). 6. Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Free Press, 2006), 73. 7. Howard Berg, quoted in Intelligent Design: William A. Dembski and Michael Ruse in Dialogue, ed. Robert B. Stewart (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 17. 8. Dawkins, Blind Watchmaker, 6. 9. William Dembski put it this way: “How did this little motor come about? Darwinists have proposed various explanations. All such explanations try to make plausible how systems simpler than the flagellum might have evolved into a flagellum. But systems simpler than a flagellum don’t work as a flagellum, so if they evolved into a flagellum, they must have started off doing something else. But what? … Undirected material processes give no evidence of producing such complex machinelike structures” (William A. Dembski and Sean McDowell, Understanding Intelligent Design: Everything You Need to Know in Plain Language [Eugene, OR: Harvest, 2008], 27). 10. University of Utah biologist professor David Blair described the amazing similarities: “An ensemble of over forty different kinds of proteins makes up the typical bacterial flagellum. These proteins function in concert as a literal rotary motor. The bacterial flagellum’s components stand as direct analogs to the parts of a man-made motor, including a rotor, stator, drive shaft, bushing, universal joint, and propeller” (“How Bacteria Sense and Swim,” Annual Review of Microbiology 49 [October 1995]: 489–520). 11. Fazale Rana observed, “The contrast between … synthetic molecular motors designed by some of the finest and most creative organic chemists in the world and the elegance and complexity of molecular motors found in 300 god’s crime scene

cells is striking.… Is it really reasonable to conclude that these biomotors are the products of blind, undirected physical and chemical processes, when they are far beyond what the best human minds can achieve?” (Cell’s Design, 90, 96). 12. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, 71–72. 13. Biologist Scott Minnich and philosopher Stephen Meyer explained the informational dependency of flagella: “To choreograph the assembly of the parts of the flagellar motor, present-day bacteria need an elaborate system of genetic instructions as well as many other protein machines to time the expression of those assembly instruc- tions” (“Genetic Analysis of Coordinate Flagellar and Type III Regulatory Circuits in Pathogenic Bacteria,” in Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Design and Nature [September 1, 2004]). 14. For more information on the flagellum assembly, refer to S. Kalir et al., “Ordering Genes in a Flagella Pathway by Analysis of Expression Kinetics from Living Bacteria,” Science 292 (June 15, 2001): 2080–83; and Gavin S. Chilcott and Kelly T. Hughes, “Coupling of Flagellar Gene Expression to Flagellar Assembly in Salmonella enterica Serovar Typhimurium and Escherichia coli,” Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews 64 (December 2000): 694–708. 15. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, 264. 16. Franklin Harold recognized the limits of natural laws in regulating the “self-assembly” of cellular structures and micro-machines such as the bacterial flagellum: “Molecular self-assembly represents an essential principle of biological organization, the first stage on the road from molecules to cells. But molecular self-assembly does not suffice to account for cellular organization, and this failure is highly significant” (The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms, and the Order of Life [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], 81). 17. Harold, Way of the Cell, 113. 18. Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 83. 19. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1876; repr., New York: New York University Press, 1988), 154. 20. Dembski put it this way: “Once intelligence is out of the picture, evolution, as Darwin notes … has to be gradual. You can’t just magically materialize completely new structures out of nowhere. There has to be a path-dependence. You have to get there by some gradual route from something that already exists” (Intelligent Design, 14). 21. Dembski said, “Indeed, the other side has not even been able to imagine a putative evolutionary pathway, to say nothing of providing a detailed, step-by-step, fully articulated, testable evolutionary pathway to the flagellum” (Intelligent Design, 17). 22. Dembski described why this kind of exactitude is best explained by the purposeful choices of an intelligent designer: “Now where does choice, that defining characteristic of intelligent agency, figure into this criterion? The problem is that we never witness choice directly. Instead, we witness actualizations of contingency that might be the result of choice (i.e., direct contingency), but that also might be the result of chance (i.e., blind contingency). Now there is only one way to tell the difference—specification. Specification is the only The Investigative Notes 301

means available to us for distinguishing choice from chance, directed contingency from blind contingency. Actualization and exclusion together guarantee we are dealing with contingency. Specification guarantees we are dealing with a directed contingency” (The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 64). 23. Franklin Harold described the difficulty: patial“S and temporal order, commonly intricate and highly repro- ducible, is the hallmark of every cell and organism. It leaps out at us, whether we are watching the living cell or pore over its ultrastructure, but how cells manage the choreography of their components is still nearly as baffling as it seemed … two decades ago” (Way of the Cell, 142). 24. Philip Kitcher, “Born-Again Creationism,” in Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives, ed. Robert T. Pennock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 263–64. 25. Philosopher Michael Ruse voiced a common objection: “Why, if a designer was involved in producing the very complex and wonderfully functioning organisms we see around us, did he (or it) not avoid producing the very simple yet devastating effects? Thanks to Dembski’s analysis, the designer gets points for the flagellum motor (the product of design) and yet is off the hook for the hemophilia mutation (the product of chance)” (The Evolution-Creation Struggle [Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2005], 254). 26. Kenneth Miller described the problem: “The theory of intelligent design cannot explain the presence of non- functional pseudogenes unless it is willing to allow that the designer made serious errors, wasting millions of bases of DNA on a blueprint full of junk and scribbles. Evolution, in contrast, can easily explain them as nothing more than failed experiments in a random process of gene duplication that persist in the genome as evolutionary remnants” (“Life’s Grand Design,” Technology Review 97, no. 2 [February/March 1994], 32). 27. Michael Shermer argued, “Just because Intelligent Design theorists cannot think of how nature could have created something through evolution, that does not mean that scientists will not be able to do so either” (Why Darwin Matters: The Case against Intelligent Design [New York: Owl Books, 2006], 80). 28. Describing the inference of design in the bacterial flagellum, illiamW Dembski concluded, “It’s not because of what we don’t know but because of what we do know that we infer design. Here we have a system that bears all the hallmarks of intelligence. It is a bidirectional, motor-driven propeller. Humans invented systems like this long before they even knew what a bacterial flagellum is or does; and then they found these motors in biological systems” (Intelligent Design, 19). 29. Physicist and Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin described it this way: “Evolution by natural selection …, which Darwin conceived as a great theory, has lately come to function more as an antitheory, called upon to cover up embarrassing experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are … at worst not even wrong. Your protein defies the laws of mass action? Evolution did it! Your complicated mess of chemical reactions turns into a chicken? Evolution! The human brain works on logical principles no computer can emulate? Evolution is the cause” (A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down [New York: Basic Books, 2006], 168–69). 302 god’s crime scene

30. John Lennox, “Intelligent Design: Some Critical Reflections on the Current Debate,” in Intelligent Design: William A. Dembski and Michael Ruse in Dialogue, ed. Robert B. Stewart (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 188. 31. Michael Denton described the incomparable craftsmanship of biological systems: “Despite the dreams of artificial life and the gurus of nanotechnology, the undeniable fact remains that many characteristics of living organisms are still without any significant analogue in any machine which has yet been constructed. Every living system replicates itself, yet no machine yet possesses this capacity even to the slightest degree” (Nature’s Destiny, 147).

Chapter 4: Secondary Investigation 1. Refer to Intelligent Design: William A. Dembski and Michael Ruse in Dialogue, ed. Robert B. Stewart (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 18. 2. Robert T. Pennock, ed., Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 263–64. 3. Intelligent Design: Dembski and Ruse, 17. 4. H. Allen Orr, “Darwin v. Intelligent Design (Again),” Boston Review, December/January 1996–1997, 29. 5. As Michael Behe observed, “Some evolutionary biologists—like Richard Dawkins—have fertile imaginations. Given a starting point, they almost always can spin a story to get to any biological structure you wish. The talent can be valuable, but it is a two-edged sword. Although they might think of possible evolutionary routes other people overlook, they also tend to ignore details and roadblocks that would trip up their scenarios. Science, however, cannot ultimately ignore relevant details, and at the molecular level all the ‘details’ become critical. If a molecular nut or bolt is missing, then the whole system can crash” (Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution [New York: Free Press, 2006], 65). 6. Biologist and flagella researcher R. M. acnabM described the conundrum: “Clearly, nature has found two good uses for this sophisticated type of apparatus. How they evolved is another matter, although it has been pro- posed that the flagellum is the more ancient device” (“How Bacteria Assemble Flagella,” Annual Review of Microbiology 57 [2003]: 77–100). 7. See L. Nguyen et al., “Phylogenetic Analyses of the Constituents of Type III Protein Secretion Systems,” Journal of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology 2, no. 2 (2000): 125–44. 8. Jonathan Witt, “Random Acts of Design,” in God and Evolution, ed. Jay Richards (Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2010), 110. 9. R. E. Lenski et al., “TheEvolutionary Origin of Complex Features,” Nature 423 (2003): 139–144, doi:10.1038 /nature01568. 10. Adrian Thompson, “AnEvolved Circuit, Intrinsic in Silicon, Entwined with Physics,” Evolvable Systems from Biology to Hardware 1259 (1997): 390–405, doi:10.1007/3-540-63173-9_61. The Investigative Notes 303

11. Michael J. Behe, “Irreducible Complexity: Obstacle to Darwinian Evolution,” in Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, ed. William A. Dembski and Michael Ruse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 352–70. 12. Refer to Winston Ewert, “Digital Irreducible Complexity: A Survey of Irreducible Complexity in Computer Simulations,” BIO-Complexity 1 (2014): 1–10, doi:10.5048/BIO-C.2014.1. 13. Lenski et al., “Evolutionary Origin.” 14. Engineer and computer scientist Winston Ewert said, “Darwinian evolution is an ateleological process.… If a model is designed to assist the evolution of an irreducibly complex system, it is not a model of Darwinian evolution. Since it is not a model of Darwinian evolution, it cannot tell us whether or not Darwinian evolution can account for irreducibly complex systems” (“Digital Irreducible Complexity”). 15. Refer to Behe, Darwin’s Black Box. 16. See Michael Ruse’s objection in chapter 4, endnote 25. 17. See Kenneth Miller’s description in chapter 4, endnote 26. 18. William Dembski wrote, “The first question that needs to be answered about the panda’s thumb is whether it displays clear marks of intelligence. The design theorist is not committed to every biological structure being designed. Mutation and selection do operate in natural history to adapt organisms to their environments. Perhaps the panda’s thumb is merely such an adaptation and not designed” (William A. Dembski and James M. Kushiner, ed., Signs of Intelligence: Understanding Intelligent Design [Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2001], 10). 19. As Fazale Rana observed, “The appearance of a faulty design doesn’t necessarily indicate an evolutionary origin but may instead reflect the effects of entropy superimposed on once optimal biochemical systems” (The Cell’s Design: How Chemistry Reveals the Creator’s Artistry [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2008], 248). 20. Hidenori Nishihara, Arian F. A. Smit, and Norihiro Okada, “Functional Noncoding Sequences Derived from SINEs in the Mammalian Genome,” Genome Research 16 (2006): 864–74, www.genome.org/cgi/content /full/16/7/864. Additional studies are proving “junk DNA” to be more functional than previously believed. Scientists in California surveyed 10,402 noncoding elements in the human genome and found an unexpect- edly high percentage had a role to play in gene regulation (Craig B. Lowe, Gill Bejerano, and David Haussler, “Thousands of Human Mobile Element Fragments Undergo Strong Purifying Selection Near Developmental Genes,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104 [2007]: 8005–10, www.pnas.org/cgi/content /full/104/19/8005). Biologists in Australia agreed: “While less than 1.5% of the mammalian genome encodes proteins, it is now evident that the vast majority is transcribed, mainly into non-protein-coding RNA … [of which] increasing numbers are being shown to be functional” (Michael Pheasant and John S. Mattick, “Raising the Estimate of Functional Human Sequences,” Genome Research 17 [2007]: 1245–53, www.genome .org/cgi/content/full/17/9/1245). 21. Henry Petroski, Invention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 30. 304 god’s crime scene

22. Michael Behe agreed: “The argument from imperfection overlooks the possibility that the designer might have multiple motives, with engineering excellence oftentimes relegated to a secondary role.… Another problem with the argument from imperfection is that it critically depends on a psychoanalysis of the unidentified designer, yet the reasons that a designer would or would not do anything are virtually impossible to know unless the designer tells you specifically what those reasons are” (Darwin’s Black Box, 223). 23. George Ayoub, “On the Design of the Vertebrate Retina,” Origins & Design 17 (Winter 1996): 1, http://www .arn.org/docs/odesign/od171/retina171.htm. 24. Kate McAlpine, “Evolution Gave Flawed Eye Better Vision,” New Scientist, May 6, 2010. 25. New work has shown that the “backward” design of the retina is actually optimal. See John Hewitt, “Fiber Optic Light Pipes in the Retina Do Much More Than Simple Image Transfer,” Phys.org, July 21, 2014, accessed April 15, 2015, http://phys.org/news/2014-07-fiber-optic-pipes-retina-simple.html. 26. Dembski and Kushiner, Signs of Intelligence, 8. 27. Michael Shermer claimed, “There are wings on flightless birds, and of course humans are replete with useless vestigial structures, a distinctive sign of our evolutionary ancestry” (Why Darwin Matters: The Case against Intelligent Design [New York: Owl Books, 2006], 18). 28. “Vestigial eyes, for example, are clear evidence that these cave salamanders must have had ancestors who were different from them—had eyes, in this case. That is evolution. Why on earth would God create a salamander with vestiges of eyes?” (Richard Dawkins, quoted in Christopher Hitchens, “Losing Sight of Progress: How Blind Salamanders Make Nonsense of Creationists’ Claims,” Slate, July 21, 2008, accessed April 15, 2015, www.slate.com/id/2195683). 29. Charles Q. Choi, “The Appendix: Useful and in actF Promising,” Live Science, August 24, 2009, www .livescience.com/10571-appendix-fact-promising.html. 30. Michael Behe cited human tonsils as another example of what used to be considered a vestigial structure: “Because we have not yet discovered a use for a structure does not mean that no use exists. The tonsils were once considered to be useless organs, but an important function in immunity has been discovered for them” (Darwin’s Black Box, 226). 31. William A. Dembski and Sean McDowell, Understanding Intelligent Design: Everything You Need to Know in Plain Language (Eugene, OR: Harvest, 2008), 52–53. 32. Biologist Douglas Futuyma described several examples of what he believed were vestigial structures in reptiles (such as the apparent vestige of a pelvis found in pythons). But listing such features does nothing to explain their original appearance within the species: “Folks such as Douglas Futuyma, who cite vestigial organs as evidence of evolution, have the same problem. Futuyma never explains how a real pelvis or eye developed in the first place, so as to be able to give rise to a vestigial organ later on, yet both the functioning organ and the vestigial organ require explanation” (Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, 226). The Investigative Notes 305

Chapter 5: Our Experience of Consciousness 1. Edward Feser, Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), 51. 2. David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: nI Search of a Fundamental Theory(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3. 3. In this chapter, I am presenting a modern, scientific, post-Cartesian view of matter (in which matter is con- sidered broadly in mathematical-mechanistic categories). René Descartes (from whom the term Cartesian is derived) was a seventeenth-century French philosopher who offered a “substance dualist” view of humans. He believed the body was material and worked like a machine according to the laws of nature, while the mind (or soul) was nonmaterial and independent of the laws of nature. This post-Cartesian definition of matter, unlike prior classical notions offered by Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas (in which matter is more of a metaphysical notion), has been largely adopted by the scientific community. The case for an external causal agent is not diminished, however, if an Aristotelian or Thomistic view of matter is, in fact, the correct view. In either case (from a Cartesian or Thomistic perspective), the existence of a nonmaterial causal agent is still the best infer- ence from the evidence. The difference would lie in exactly how the argument for God would proceed given these starting facts from the physical universe. For a treatment of the Thomistic perspective, see Edward Feser’s Scholastic Metaphysics. For a treatment of how the Thomistic arguments for God’s existence would proceed, see Feser’s The Last Superstition. For a treatment from a Thomistic perspective of the significance of the influence of Descartes’s view vis-à-vis the classical view, see Etienne Gilson’s The Unity of Philosophical Experience. For an in-depth and thorough treatment from a Thomistic perspective of these issues related to human nature, see George P. Klubertanz’s The Philosophy of Human Nature and Christina Van Dyke’s “Not Properly a Person: The Rational Soul and ‘Thomistic Substance Dualism’” (Faith and Philosophy 26, no. 2 [April 2009]: 186–204). 4. For an excellent, more thoroughgoing and philosophically articulate survey of the differences between physical entities and mental entities, see J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, “The Mind-Body Problem: Dualism” and “The Mind-Body Problem: Alternatives to Dualism,” chaps. 11 and 12, in Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003). I have summarized (and supplemented) much of Moreland and Craig’s work in this chapter. 5. For the main arguments explaining intentionality from a naturalistic perspective, refer to Stephen P. Stich and Ted A. Warfield’s Mental Representation: A Reader. For a response to these explanations, refer to John R. Searle’s The Rediscovery of the Mind. 6. These “knowledge argument” illustrations were formulated originally by Frank Jackson. For more information, refer to “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” The Philosophical Quarterly 32, no. 127 (April 1982): 127–36; and “What Mary Didn’t Know,” The Journal of Philosophy 83, no. 5 (May 1986): 291–95. 7. For more information about the “apparent clash between the picture Science gives of the world around us and the picture our senses give us,” refer to Howard Robinson, Matter and Sense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), particularly page 7. 306 god’s crime scene

8. For more on this, refer to chapter 3, “Materialism,” in Feser’s Philosophy of Mind. 9. For more information related to behaviorism, refer to the works of the two men most often connected with the concept: John B. Watson’s Behaviorism and B. F. Skinner’s About Behaviorism. 10. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist, Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 45. 11. John R. Searle, The ediscoveryR of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 48–49. 12. J. P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae, Body and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2000), 232.

Chapter 5: Secondary Investigation 1. For more information related to the identity theory of mind, refer to the work of U. T. Place, included in Identifying the Mind. See also Herbert Feigl, Mind, Matter and Method; Cynthia Macdonald, Mind-Body Identity Theories; and Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events. 2. Edward Feser, Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), 68. 3. For more information related to the zombie argument (also known as the modal argument), see Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity; and David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind. For a critique of this argument, see Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained. 4. For more information on behaviorism, see chapter 5, endnote 9. 5. For more information on functionalism, refer to Hilary Putnam, “Minds and Machines,” in Dimensions of Mind; and David Malet Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind. 6. John R. Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1980): 417–24, doi:10.1017 /S0140525X00005756. 7. For more information related to the “Chinese Nation” objection, refer to Ned Block, “Troubles with Functionalism,” Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 9 (1978): 261–325. 8. For more information related to eliminative materialism, refer to Daniel Dennett, “Quining Qualia,” in Consciousness in Contemporary Science, ed. A. J. Marcel and E. Bisiach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 42–77; and Paul Churchland, “Reduction, Qualia, and the Direct Inspection of Brain States,” Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985): 8–28. 9. For more information about the self-refuting nature of eliminative materialism, refer to Peter Boghossian, “The Status of Content,” Philosophical Review 99 (1990): 157–84; and “The Status of Content Revisited,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1991): 264–78. Edward Feser also does an excellent job of describing the self- refuting nature of eliminative materialism in Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), 193–98. 10. See previous endnote. 11. For more information related to dualism, refer to John Foster, The Immaterial Self; Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain; and Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul. The Investigative Notes 307

12. For information related to occasionalism, refer to the work of Johannes Clauberg, Claude Clerselier, and Nicolas Malebranche. 13. For more information related to parallelism, refer to the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. 14. For more information related to epiphenomenalism, refer to the work of Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Pierre Jean George Cabanis, and Thomas Henry Huxley. 15. For more information about neurosurgeons who hold to dualistic explanations, refer to Wilder Penfield, Mystery of the Mind; and Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain. 16. For an example of an evolutionist who holds this position, refer to Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 21. 17. For more on the difficulties raised as science discovers more about the brain, refer to Feser, Philosophy of Mind, 76–77.

Chapter 6: Free Will or Full Wiring 1. J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig explained, “Most philosophers agree about the ability condition: that in order to have the freedom necessary for responsible agency, one must have the ability to choose or act dif- ferently from the way the agent actually does” (Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003], 271). 2. As philosopher Mark Balaguer put it, “Determinism is the view that all events are like this. It’s the view that every physical event is completely caused by prior events together with the laws of nature. Or, to put the point differently, it’s the view that every event has a cause that makes it happen in the one and only way that it could have happened. (Actually, this characterization of determinism is a bit rough. If you want a precise definition, we can say that determinism is the view that a complete statement of the laws of nature, together with a com- plete description of the universe at some specific time, logically entails a complete description of the universe at all later times)” (Free Will [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014], 12). 3. Mark Balaguer again: “If determinism is true, then as soon as the Big Bang took place 13 billion years ago, the entire history of the universe was already settled. In other words, it was already determined that everything would take place exactly as it has taken place. It was already determined, for instance, that there would be a tsunami in Japan in 2011. Why? Because if determinism is true, then every time something happens, there’s only one next thing that can happen. So once the Big Bang happened, the next event was forced on us by the laws of physics; and then the next event after that was forced on us as well; and likewise for the next one, and the next one, and the next one, all the way through history. So according to determinism, once the Big Bang happened, it was just an inevitable step-by-step 13-billion-year march to the 2011 tsunami. That’s a pretty striking claim” (Free Will, 14). 4. According to Sam Harris, “Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious 308 god’s crime scene

control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.… You are not in control of your mind—because you, as a conscious agent, are only part of your mind, living at the mercy of other parts. You can do what you decide to do—but you cannot decide what you will decide to do” (Free Will [New York: Free Press, 2012], 5, 37–38). 5. Author Meghan Griffith described it this way: “Libet concluded omfr his study that we do not have any positive kind of free will. But interestingly, he hypothesized that we may have what some have referred to as ‘free won’t.’ This is a kind of veto power over actions that are already underway. Subjects in his experiments reported having urges to move that they did not subsequently act upon. It seemed that they were able to veto such actions and thereby stop them from occurring” (Free Will: The Basics[New York: Routledge, 2013], 108–9). 6. For more information related to the John-Dylan Haynes studies, refer to Balaguer, Free Will, 31. 7. For a discussion of this reality, see Griffith, Free Will, 28. 8. As Griffith wrote, “Everything that will happen next week is already determined, as is everything that will happen next month, next year, and so on. So it’s not just that certain events are fated to happen no matter what leads up to them. Instead, the entire sequence must happen exactly as it does. It’s also crucial to point out that human beings and their actions would not be immune to the effects of determinism. I am assuming that human agents operate within the natural world and are thus subject to it. If there are exceptionless laws of nature, it stands to reason that our bodies—including our brains—would have to obey them” (Free Will, 18). 9. Morissette v. United States, 342 U.S. 246, 342 U.S. 250 (1952). See also Blocker v. United States, 110 U.S. App. D.C. 41, 53, 288 F.2d 853, 865 (1961) (opinion concurring in result), accessed August 1, 2014, http:// supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/438/41/case.html. 10. “Free will also seems to require that the sources or origins of our actions lie “in us” rather than in something else (such as the decrees of fate, the foreordaining acts of God, or antecedent causes and laws of nature) outside us and beyond our control . . . To be ultimately responsible for an action, an agent must be responsible for anything that is a sufficient cause or motive for the actions occurring” (John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, and Manuel Vargas, Four Views on Free Will [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007], 14). 11. For a more detailed discussion of the ultimate source of moral responsibility and its relationship to free will, see Griffith, Free Will, 47. 12. For a more detailed survey of the philosophical views related to compatibilism, determinism, and libertarian free will, see Robert Kane, ed., Free Will (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 22–23, and Griffith,Free Will, 48–49. 13. Naturalist Michael Shermer put it this way: “Yet even if it could be established that quantum uncertainties lead to random neuronal firings, that does not produce free will; it just adds another deterministic causal factor, one that is random rather than non-random” (The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule [New York: Owl Books, 2005], 123). 14. Refer to Kane, Free Will, 19. 15. Moreland and Craig, Philosophical Foundations, 278. The Investigative Notes 309

Chapter 6: Secondary Investigation 1. Meghan Griffith, Free Will: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2013), 40. 2. For more information on Harry Frankfurt’s first- and second-order hierarchy, see Griffith, Free Will, 54–55. 3. For more information related to critiques of Frankfurt’s hierarchal structure, refer to John Martin Fischer, Free Will: Free Agency, Moral Responsibility, and Skepticism (Danvers, MA: Taylor & Francis, 2005), 71–73. 4. Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 136. 5. David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: nI Search of a Fundamental Theory(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 93. 6. Michael Gazzaniga put it this way: “Emergence is mightily resisted by many neuroscientists, who sit grimly in the corner and continue to shake their heads. They have been celebrating that they have finally dislodged the homunculus out of the brain. They have defeated dualism. All the ghosts in the machine have been banished and they, as sure as shootin’, are not letting any back in. They are afraid that to put emergence in the equation may imply that something other than the brain is doing the work and that would let the ghost back into the deterministic machine that the brain is” (Who’s in Charge?, 135–36). 7. Griffith,Fr ee Will, 20–21. 8. For more information, refer to Mark Balaguer, Free Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 21. 9. For more on the variety of quantum physics models currently considered, see Daniel F. Styer et al., “Nine for- mulations of quantum mechanics,” American Journal of Physics 70, no. 3 (March 2002): 288–97. In addition, read the argument about how our present quantum theory is incomplete in Roger Penrose’s book The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (New York: Vintage Books, 2007). 10. For more on the debate related to the potentially determinate nature of quantum physics, refer to Balaguer, Free Will, 21; Griffith, Free Will: The Basics, 103–4; and John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, and Manuel Vargas, Four Views on Free Will (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 181–82. 11. For more, refer to Griffith, Free Will, 104. 12. For more on the detrimental effect of indeterminacy on free will, eferr to J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), 279. 13. Sam Harris, Free Will (New York: Free Press, 2012), 29. 14. Robert Kane, ed., Free Will (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 18. 15. Harris, Free Will, 52. 16. Harris, Free Will, 53. 17. International Social Survey Program: Religion II, 1998 (computer file), Koeln, Germany: Zentralarchiv fuer Empirische Sozialforschung (producer), 2000. 18. Kathleen D. Vohs and Jonathan W. Schooler, “The Value of Believing in Free Will: Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increases Cheating,” Psychological Science 19, no. 1 (2008): https://pensaralem.files.wordpress .com/2014/06/the-value-of-believing-in-free-will-2008.pdf. 310 god’s crime scene

19. Roy F. Baumeister, E. J. Masicampo, and C. Nathan DeWall, “Prosocial Benefits of Feeling Free: Disbelief in Free Will Increases Aggression and Reduces Helpfulness,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35 (2009): www-socpsy.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/karasawa/_src/sc1347/Baumeister20et20al.2028200929.pdf. 20. Gazzaniga, Who’s in Charge?, 115. 21. Refer to Sam Harris’s deterministic perspective on the role of incarceration, Free Will, 52. 22. For a more extensive discussion of alternate interpretations of Libet and Haynes, refer to Balaguer, Free Will, 114–17. 23. For more on the challenges facing the understandability of libertarian free will, refer to Peter van Inwagen, “The Mystery of Metaphysical Freedom,” in Free Will, ed. Robert Kane, (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 199. 24. For more related to the objections of nonphysical causation, refer to Fischer, Kane, Pereboom, and Vargas, Four Views, 9. 25. Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Kaufmann, Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 2011), 21. 26. Refer to Robert Kane, A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 150. 27. Such, for example, is the language of the Westminster Confession of Faith: “God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established” (chapter III, section 1, “Of God’s Eternal Decree,” www.icstc.com/bg/will/west.html). Thomas Aquinas also discussed the providence of God and the free will of humans in Summa Theologiae(first part, question 22), in Truth (question 24), and in On Evil (question 6). 28. For more information related to the diverse theistic responses to the issue of foreknowledge, refer to Kane, Contemporary Introduction to Free Will, 153–60.

Chapter 7: Law and Order 1. For more related to this survey, visit http://philpapers.org/surveys and refer to the work of David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 203. 2. J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig described the intuitive nature of moral truth in the following way: “While philosophers differ over a precise definition of intuitions, a common usage defines an intuition as an immediate, direct awareness or acquaintance with something. An intuition is a mode of awareness—sensory, intellectual, or otherwise—in which something seems or appears to be directly present to one’s conscious- ness.… Intuitions are not infallible, but they are prima facie justified. That is, if one carefully reflects on something, and a certain viewpoint intuitively seems to be true, then one is justified in believing that viewpoint in the absence of overriding counterarguments (which will ultimately rely on alternative intuitions).” For more The Investigative Notes 311

on the intuitively obvious nature of moral truth, see J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), 422. 3. Refer to sections 196–97 in the California Penal Code 2014 (Eagan, MN: West Group, 2014). 4. According to professor of psychology Dennis L. Krebs, “Contemporary researchers have found cultural uni- versals in conceptions of morality. The anthropologist Brown (1991) found that people from all cultures distinguish right from wrong and that all people possess a sense of rights and obligations attached to persons and other statuses. In addition, he found that all cultures contain prohibitions against violence, rape, mur- der, and other acts that undermine the welfare of groups. Another anthropologist, Boehm (2008), reviewed hunter-gatherers’ moral codes and found that all of them prohibited murder, incest, adultery, bullying, lying, cheating, stealing, and excessive selfishness. In addition, these moral codes promoted generosity, cooperation, and group harmony. Sober and Wilson (1998) found that all 25 cultures that they surveyed possessed norms upholding personal autonomy, mutual aid, cooperation, and group welfare, as well as norms prohibiting cheating and free-riding. Other surveys have revealed that people from all cultures consider three types of acts immoral: acts that inflict unnecessary harm on people, acts that violate people’s rights, and acts that produce unjust outcomes (Miller, 2006, p. 383)” (The Origins of Morality: An Evolutionary Account [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011], 18). 5. For a more robust discussion of the existence of objective moral truths, see Louis P. Pojman, “A Defense of Ethical Objectivism,” in Moral Philosophy: A Reader, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 47–48. 6. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 6. 7. Consider the following notable proclamations: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow-man” (Judaism: Talmud, Shabbat 3id). “Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself” (Confucianism: The Analects of Confucius XV.24). “In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you” (Christianity: The Gospel of Matthew 7:12). “Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful” (Buddhism: Tripitaka Udana-varga 5:18). “Do not do to others that which angers you when they do it to you” (Greek philosophy: Isocrates, Nicocles or the Cyprians, Isoc. 3.61). “Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you” (Islam: The Last Sermon [Khutbah] of Prophet Muhammad, Farewell Sermon). “This is the sum of duty; do naught onto others what you would not have them do unto you” (Hinduism: Mahabharata 5 1517 from the Vedic tradition). 8. When describing the nature of objective moral “absolutes,” J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig articulated the following properties: “(1) Moral statements have truth values which make no reference to the beliefs of individuals or cultures. (2) There are objectively good/bad arguments for the truth of moral positions people take. (3) Non-moral facts (e.g., persons exist) and moral facts (irreducibly moral properties like goodness) are relevant to the assessment of the truth value of moral statements. (4) When two moral statements conflict, only one can be true. (5) There is a single true morality.” For more, refer to Moreland and Craig, Philosophical Foundations, 421. 312 god’s crime scene

9. Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press, 2011), 1. 10. For a more expansive description of the relationship between objective moral truth and the “teleology” of the human species, see Evan Fales, “Naturalist Moral Realism,” in God and Morality: Four Views, ed. R. Keith Loftin (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2012), 13–51. 11. For an extensive discussion of the problem of grounding human dignity from a naturalistic perspective, refer to William Lane Craig’s comments in his “Opening Statement,” in Is Goodness without God Good Enough? A Debate on Faith, Secularism, and Ethics, ed. Robert K. Garcia and Nathan L. King (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 31. 12. Dennis Krebs observed, “Although humans are different from other animals in many ways, humans also engage in beastly behaviors. Members of families compete for resources, sometimes to the point of killing one another. As documented by Daly and Wilson (1983), stepchildren are especially susceptible to abuse. People commit adultery; men rape women, and women cuckold men. Jails are bursting with people who assault others, steal their possessions, and cheat them out of their money. Infanticide is common in some cultures. Although can- nibalism is rare in the human species, people kill one another at a relatively high rate, especially during wars and bouts of ‘ethnic cleansing’” (Origins of Morality, 31). 13. Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985), 14. 14. Craig, “Opening Statement,” 32. 15. Baggett and Walls, Good God, 11.

Chapter 7: Secondary Investigation 1. Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 36. 2. Emmett Barcalow, Moral Philosophy: Theories and Issues, 3rd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002), 55. 3. For more, refer to Barcalow, Moral Philosophy, 56. 4. Professor of philosophy Emmett Barcalow put it this way: “Most philosophers today reject the view that a sentence is meaningless if it is used to attribute properties whose presence cannot be detected by means of empirical observation and testing. So even if sentences attributing the property of being morally wrong to things cannot be verified or confirmed by appeal to observation, it doesn’t follow that they’re meaningless. It only means that they’re not verifiable or confirmable. They still could be true or false. And then it would only follow that we cannot appeal to observation to verify or confirm the truth of a claim attributing a moral property to something” (Moral Philosophy, 55). 5. For more related to the claim moral truths are merely fixed features of the universe, see David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 20. 6. Philosophers David Baggett and Jerry Walls put it this way: “Naturalism can make good sense of why we might feel or believe that we have moral obligations, but it has a much harder time explaining moral obligations The Investigative Notes 313

themselves, and its deterministic framework means that vital moral categories, to survive, have to be watered down and replaced” (Good God, 28). 7. “Plato’s account of the ‘Forms’ (including the Good) as moral exemplars leaves them in metaphysical limbo. They would exist as essentially intelligible ideas even if there were no mind, human or divine, to recognize them: as objects of thought, not mere constructs or concepts. But, as Augustine learned, and as the Greek Neoplatonists had asserted, the notion of an eternal object of thought (and thus for Plato a cause of thought) without a ceaseless thinking subject is unintelligible. Intelligible Forms, never proposed as mere concepts, can- not be proposed as Plato originally proposed them, as free-floating metaphysical items” (Real Ethics: Rethinking the Foundations of Morality [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 40). 8. Baggett and Walls put it this way: “The need for Platonic forms ultimately to be grounded in a mind that rec- ognizes them is once again keenly felt. ‘Free floating metaphysical items’ do not have the ontological strength and stability that we think morality must have. Even if we discern these moral truths before we identify their deeper foundations, this only reminds us again that the order of knowing is distinct from the order of being” (Good God, 21). 9. For more, refer to Barcalow, Moral Philosophy, 62. 10. For more on ethical egoism, see J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), 426. 11. Dennis L. Krebs summarized Williams’s work: “To support the conclusion that animals are born bad, George Williams (1989) offered ‘obvious examples of the pursuit of self-interest as practiced in the biological cosmos,’ noting that, ‘I will need no theoretical subtleties to show their gross selfishness and moral unacceptability’ (p. 197). Williams reviews evidence that, ‘murder’ and infanticide are common in the animal kingdom. ‘Death from strife among neighbors tends to be recorded for any wild animal population carefully observed for a thousand hours or more’ (p. 204). Although the males of most vertebrate species tend to be more blatantly aggressive than the females are, Williams argues that there is plenty of evidence of female aggression: ‘Females commonly deprive each other of resources in various ways, aggressively interfere with one another’s repro- duction, attack one another’s young, and actively aggravate male competition when it serves their interests’ (p. 205). In addition to this evidence, Williams offered examples of offspring exploiting their parents and mates exploiting one another. ‘Recent accounts of reproductive behavior in wild animals are tales of sexual intrigue full of deception, desertion, double-dealing, and sometimes lethal violence’ (p. 201). ‘Besides adultery and rape, just about every other kind of sexual behavior that has been regarded as sinful or unethical can be found abundantly in nature’ (p. 202). Williams closes his case in support of the ‘triumph of selfishness’ by noting that ‘none of the [examples of immorality] are really needed for the argument being advanced; the inescapable arithmetic of predation and parasitism should be enough to show that nature is morally unaccept- able.… The survival of one organism is possible only at great cost to others. The moral message in this obvious fact has been recognized by many philosophers and humanists, despite the general prevalence of romanticism’ 314 god’s crime scene

(p. 229)” (The Origins of orality:M An Evolutionary Account [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011], 30–31, quoting George C. Williams, “A Sociobiological Expansion of ‘Evolution and Ethics,’” in Evolution and Ethics [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989], 179–214). 12. Louis P. Pojman, “A Defense of Ethical Objectivism,” in Moral Philosophy: A Reader, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 41. 13. According to philosopher John Ladd, “Ethical relativism is the doctrine that the moral rightness and wrongness of actions vary from society to society and that there are not absolute universal moral standards on all men at all times” (Ethical Relativism [Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1973], 1). 14. Refer to Ruth Benedict, “A Defense of Ethical Relativism,” in Louis P. Pojman, ed., Moral Philosophy: A Reader, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 36. 15. For a more robust description of the confusion between cultural diversity and moral clarity, refer to Moreland and Craig, Philosophical Foundations, 410. 16. Philosopher Louis Pojman described the problem this way: “The problem is that the notion of a culture or soci- ety is notoriously difficult to define. This is especially so in a pluralistic society like our own where the notion seems to be vague with unclear boundary lines. One person may belong to several societies (subcultures) with different value emphases and arrangements of principles” (“Defense of Ethical Objectivism,” 42). 17. For an excellent and robust account of moral truth from the perspective of an evolutionist, refer to Krebs, Origins of Morality; and Christopher Boehm, Moral Origins. 18. For more on Huxley’s view on the relationship between evolution and morality, refer to Michael Ruse, “Naturalist Moral Nonrealism,” in God and Morality: Four Views, ed. R. Keith Loftin (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2012), 64. 19. Ruse, “Naturalist Moral Nonrealism,” 64. 20. Sam Harris wrote, “I will argue, however, that questions about values—about meaning, morality, and life’s larger purpose—are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. Values, therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood: regarding positive and negative social emotions, retributive impulses, the effects of specific laws and social institutions on human relationships, the neurophysiology of happiness and suffering, etc. The most important of these facts are bound to transcend culture—just as facts about physical and mental health do. Cancer in the highlands of New Guinea is still cancer; cholera is still cholera; schizophrenia is still schizophrenia; and so, too, I will argue, compassion is still compassion, and well-being is still well-being” (The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values [New York: Free Press, 2011], 1–2). 21. Naturalistic philosopher Evan Fales made a similar claim when rooting moral truth in human nature: “We also share something important: a common human nature. That nature, so I will argue, provides the basis for morality. The moral norms in question are perfectly objective—just as human nature is an objective feature of our existence. These norms are norms for human behavior. If human nature were different in certain ways, the The Investigative Notes 315

norms would be different, and they might differ for intelligent species (if there ear any in the universe) whose natures differ importantly from our own” (“Naturalist Moral Realism,” in God and Morality: Four Views, ed. R. Keith Loftin [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2012], 13). 22. For a more expansive description of the relationship between objective moral truth and the “teleology” of the human species, see Fales, “Naturalist Moral Realism,” 16–28. 23. Sam Harris again: “Rather I am arguing that science can, in principle, help us understand what we should do and should want—and, therefore, what other people should do and should want in order to live the best lives possible. My claim is that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, just as there are right and wrong answers to questions of physics, and such answers may one day fall within reach of the maturing sciences of mind” (Moral Landscape, 28). 24. Harris, Moral Landscape, 33. 25. Harris, Moral Landscape, 55–56. 26. Harris, Moral Landscape, 37. 27. Philosopher and psychologist Jerry Fodor explained it this way: “Science is about facts, not norms; it might tell us how we are, but it couldn’t tell us what is wrong with how we are. There couldn’t be a science of the human condition” (“Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings,” London Review of Books, October 18, 2007). 28. J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig: “Moral properties are normative properties. They carry with them a moral ‘ought.’ If some act has the property of rightness, then one ought to do that act. But natural properties like the ones listed do not carry normativeness. They just are” (Philosophical Foundations, 401). 29. Even Sam Harris admitted, “One of the problems with consequentialism in practice is that we cannot always determine whether the effects of an action will be bad or good. In fact, it can be surprisingly difficult to decide this even in retrospect” (Moral Landscape, 67). 30. Patricia Churchland, quoted in Harris, Moral Landscape, 68. 31. For a broader discussion of the problems related to moral consequentialism, see Harris, Moral Landscape, 71–72.

Chapter 8: The Evidence of Evil 1. Philosopher Peter van Inwagen described the constancy with evil and the atheistic worldview: “For an atheist, the question ‘Why do bad things happen?’ is so easy to answer that it does not deserve to be called a problem. And there is this point: even if atheists were at a loss to explain the existence of bad things, it’s hard to see why this inability should embarrass them qua atheists, for the existence of bad things has never been supposed by anyone to be incompatible with atheism” (The Problem of Evil [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], 13). 2. C. S. Lewis put it this way: “Earth herself existed without life for millions of years and may exist for millions more when life has left her. And what is it like while it lasts? It is so arranged that all the forms of life can live only by preying upon one another. In the lower forms this process entails only death, but in the higher there 316 god’s crime scene

appears a new quality called consciousness which enables it to be attended with pain. The creatures cause pain by being born, and live by inflicting pain, and in pain they mostly die. In the most complex of all the creatures, Man, yet another quality appears, which we call reason, whereby he is enabled to foresee his own pain which henceforth is preceded with acute mental suffering. And to foresee his own death while keenly desiring permanence. It also enables men by a hundred ingenious contrivances to inflict a great deal more pain than they otherwise could have done on one another and on the irrational creatures. This power they have exploited to the full. Their history is largely a record of crime, war, disease, and terror, with just sufficient happiness interposed to give them, while it lasts, an agonized apprehension of losing it, and, when it is lost, the poignant misery of remembering” (The Problem of Pain [New York: HarperOne, 2001], 2). 3. Peter van Inwagen wrote, “In addition to being omnipotent and omniscient, God is said to be morally perfect (perfectly good). That is to say, God has no moral defect whatever. It follows that he is in no way a subject of possible moral criticism. If someone says something of the form, ‘God did X and it was wrong of God to do X,’ that person must be mistaken: either God did not in fact do X, or it was not wrong of God to do X” (Problem of Evil, 26–27). 4. Naturalist philosopher Stephen Law argued against the existence of such a morally virtuous and benevolent first cause: “When we begin to consider the enormous quantities of suffering that exist—including the hundreds of millions of years of animal suffering that occurred before we humans showed up—doesn’t it quickly become apparent that it cannot all be accounted for by the suggestion that it serves some greater good? It might seem, then, that the claim that the God of classical monotheism exists is straightforwardly empirically falsified” (Humanism: A Very Short Introduction [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011], 52). 5. Some scholars doubt Epicurus was the source of this statement (allegedly attributed to Epicurus by Lactantius, an ancient Christian author who lived from AD 240–320). For more about this, read: Mark Larrimore, ed., The Problem of Evil: A Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), xix–xxi; and Reinhold F. Glei, “Et invidus et inbecillus. Das angebliche Epikurfragment bei Laktanz, De ira dei” 13, 20–21, in Vigiliae Christianae 42 (1988): 47–58. David Hume attributed a similar quote to Epicurus in his 1776 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Although Epicurus wrote quite a bit, little of his work survives. Some of Epicurus’s writing is preserved in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Eminent Philosophers and in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura. 6. Peter van Inwagen described the problem in the following way: “By the global argument from evil, I under- stand the following argument (or any argument sufficiently similar to it that the two arguments stand or fall together): We find vast amounts of truly horrendous evil in the world; if there were a God, we should not find vast amounts of horrendous evil in the world; there is, therefore, no God” (Problem of Evil, 56). 7. Charles Darwin, letter to Asa Gray, May 22, 1860. 8. Professor of metaphysics Robin Le Poidevin described the degree of evil we must explain in the following way: “It is an indisputable fact that the history of the world contains some of the most appalling suffering imagin- able, suffering that is either the result of natural disaster, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, disease and The Investigative Notes 317

famine, or the result of human actions, such as wars, ecological disasters and religious persecution. Does this present a problem for theism? Certainly there is a case to answer if we believe in a deity who is all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good. If he is all-knowing, he will be aware of suffering; if he is all-powerful, he will be able to prevent suffering; and if he is perfectly good, he will desire to prevent suffering. But, clearly, he does not prevent suffering, so either there is no such deity, or, if there is, he is not all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good, though he may be one or two of these” (Arguing for Atheism: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion [New York: Routledge, 1996], 88). 9. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 38–39.

Chapter 8: Secondary Investigation 1. The Words of Gandhi, selected by Richard Attenborough (New York: Newmarket, 2000), 12. 2. Robin Le Poidevin: “At first sight, the notion of an omnipotent God creating beings with free will seems para- doxical. If God is omnipotent, then there is nothing that he cannot control. Yet, if humans genuinely have free will—that is, their choices are not antecedently determined by God—then it seems there are some things, namely human actions, which God cannot control. But the appearance of paradox is specious. It is not that God cannot control human actions but that, in giving humans free will, he chooses not to control them. It is within his powers to intervene at any point and prevent given action, or its consequences, from occurring, but he simply refrains from exercising those powers. Choosing not to exercise one’s powers does not imply that one never really had them in the first place, so our free will is no threat to God’s omnipotence” (Arguing for Atheism: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion [New York: Routledge, 1996], 91). 3. Thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas put it this way: “Therefore, everything that does not imply a contradiction in terms, is numbered amongst those possible things, in respect of which God is called omnipotent: whereas whatever implies contradiction does not come within the scope of divine omnipotence, because it cannot have the aspect of possibility” (Summa Theologiae 1, question 25, part 3). In addition, C. S. Lewis wrote, “His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ‘God can’” (The Problem of Pain [New York: HarperOne, 2001], 18). For more on the nature of this logical impossibility, refer to J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), 539. 4. Atheist philosopher Stephen Law described the theistic position related to free agency: “God created us as free agents with the ability to choose how to act. Suffering results from our choosing to do things that are wrong. However, free will also allows for certain important goods, such as the ability to do good of our own volition. 318 god’s crime scene

Puppet creatures that always did as God commands would not do evil. But such puppet beings lack moral responsibility, and so are unable to act in a genuinely virtuous manner. By cutting our strings and setting us free, God inevitably allowed some evil (such as that done by Hitler). But the good free will allowed more than outweighs those evils” (Humanism: A Very Short Introduction [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011], 52–53). 5. See previous endnote. 6. Lewis, Problem of Pain, 31. 7. C. S. Lewis put it this way: “The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of aod G who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word ‘love,’ and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake” (Problem of Pain, 40). 8. Rutgers professor Marilyn McCord Adams noted the view held by philosopher Alvin Plantinga. Plantinga believes natural evil can be attributed to spiritual beings who possess the same free agency as humans but have the power to cause natural disasters: “Plantinga proposes God has actualized a possible world A containing significantly free creatures (angels, human beings, other kinds, what have you) with respect to whose actions there is a balance of good over evil (so that A is on balance a very good world); some of these creatures are responsible for moral and natural evil; and it was not within God’s power to create significantly free creatures with respect to whose actions there would be a better balance of good over evil than that displayed in A” (Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999], 20). 9. Even naturalist philosopher Theodore M. Drange admitted: “One merit of this defense, I think, is that it shows that some suffering is needed in an ideal world. Without any suffering whatever, the world would be bland and people could not experience the sorts of joys that they presently possess” (Nonbelief and Evil: Two Arguments for the Nonexistence of God [Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998], 145). 10. Richard Swinburne put it like this: “Agents [need] to have the knowledge of how to bring about evil or prevent its occurrence, knowledge which they must have if they are to have a genuine choice between bringing about evil and bringing about good” (The Existence of God, rev. ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991], 202–3). 11. Lewis, Problem of Pain, 41. 12. C. S. Lewis put it this way: “Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for the moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them” (Problem of Pain, 95–96). 13. Eleonore Stump, “The Problem of Evil,” Faith and Philosophy 2 (1985): 392-424. The Investigative Notes 319

14. For a fuller discussion of these three forms of justice and their relationship to free agency, see Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 206–8. 15. Bart Ehrman, surveying the biblical perspective related to this form of Divine judgment wrote, “There are, of course, other explanations for why people suffer, and the Bible itself provides some of them. Somewhat ironically, one of the other answers to the question of why people suffer is found in the writings of the very prophets who think that suffering (sometimes? often?) comes as a penalty from God for disobedience. These writers also indicate that suffering comes from disobedience in another sense. Often ‘sin’ leads to suffering, not because God is punishing the sinner but because other sinners are causing affliction. Suffering is often portrayed in the Bible simply as a consequence of sin” (God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer [New York: HarperCollins, 2009], 96). 16. For an extensive description of the cognitive limits to understanding the nature and cause of evil, see Stephen John Wykstra, “Rowe’s Noseeum Arguments from Evil,” in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 129–30. 17. Alvin Plantinga wrote, “Say that an evil is inscrutable if it is such that we can’t think of any reason God (if there is such a person) could have for permitting it. Clearly, the crucial problem for this probabilistic argument from evil is just that nothing much follows from the fact that some evils are inscrutable; if theism is true we would expect that there would be inscrutable evil. Indeed, a little reflection shows there is no reason to think we could so much as grasp God’s plans here, even if he proposed to divulge them to us. But then the fact that there is inscrutable evil does not make it improbable that God exists” (“Epistemic Probability and Evil,” in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996], 75–76).

Closing Argument: Make a Decision and Make It Now 1. See Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” 2. The Bible repeatedly describes God’s creation of the heavens with the expression “He stretched out the heavens.” See, for example, Isaiah 45:12, “It is I who made the earth, and created man upon it. I stretched out the heavens with My hands and I ordained all their host.” 3. The ancient psalmist, even though he had never seen the stars in the nighttime sky change in any perceivable way, proclaimed, “Of old You founded the earth, and the heavens are the work of Your hands. Even they will perish, but You endure; and all of them will wear out like a garment” (Psalm 102:25–26). 4. The New and OldTestaments describe the beginning of time in passages such as John 9:31–32, “We know that God does not hear sinners; but if anyone is God-fearing and does His will, He hears him. Since the beginning of time it has never been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind.” 320 god’s crime scene

5. The Bible consistently describes God as a creative fine-tuner. King David wrote, “The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge” (Psalm 19:1–2). Isaiah also wrote, “He is the God who formed the earth and made it, He established it and did not create it a waste place, but formed it to be inhabited” (Isaiah 45:18). 6. See Acts 3:14–15. 7. The people of God are consistently called to make free choices. orF example, “If it is disagreeable in your sight to

serve the LORD, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my

house, we will serve the LORD” (Joshua 24:15). 8. See Romans 13:1–7. In addition, Paul said all of us are aware of the moral law because God has written it on our hearts: “For when Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them” (Romans 2:14–15). 9. See Psalm 5:4. 10. Romans 1:20.