Recently a friend recommended a book to me--"I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist" by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek. I managed to borrow it from the local library and read it. Many of the arguments presented in the book were things I had seen before, but never all in one place. I had been introduced to both C. S. Lewis and Francis A. Schaeffer when I was in Bible college, and had read other works on apologetics back then. But I had not read much recently in that field.
One of the major problems in modern higher education is the narrow focus on a limited area. There's an old definition of a high level scholar as someone who studies more and more about less and less until he reaches the point where he knows almost everything--about almost nothing!
And there have been some once-major topics that have been ignored now for many years. One principal one is Logic. This was once taught to most students--it was considered an important part of education. Now the only exposure to it is in math classes. The problem with that is, while mathematics uses some logic, it does not use all of it. And teaching only math does not prepare a student to deal with bad arguments. Here's an example: I was hearing the idea in high school (back in the late '60s) that our thoughts are just the results of chemical and biological reactions in our brains. And what follows from that is that there is nothing more than that involved in our thinking. Well, one basic principle of traditional logic is that any line of argument that undercuts the validity of human reason is automatically invalid--because you are trying to use human reason to say there is no such thing as human reason! If what you are saying to me is only the result of random chemical reactions in your brain...why should I listen to you?
One sad truth is that the typical modern scientist does not even know the limits of his field. Speculation about the origins of the universe used to be considered part of the field of Cosmology--and it was regarded as a part of Philosophy. Now the scientist--including some of the big names in the field--does not even notice when he strays out of his field and into philosophy, because he never really studied any of it--it wasn't required for his science degrees!
For years there has been all sorts of speculation about life on earth being brought here by aliens--and the people saying it do not realize that is just kicking the can down the road. So where did the aliens come from? Who created them?
Another idea popular these days is that we live in some sort of computer simulation. To me, that's simply another Creation myth. If this is a simulation, then who created the computer? In the past I have read the Creation myths of the Greeks, Vikings, Babylonians, Egyptians, and others, including some Native American stories. The Creation story in Genesis is simpler, less extravagant, and more sensible. If you are bothered by the Genesis account of Methuselah living 969 years, the Babylonian King Lists claimed that their earliest rulers lived for 10,000 years and more!
One of the basic principles of modern science is Uniformity of Natural Causes. This means that the natural processes we see today have always worked throughout history in the same way, and at the same rate. And atheistic scientists also believe the universe is a closed system, with no God to intervene. The catch with this principle is that it is an assumption--it has never been proven; and by its very nature it cannot be proven! There were no scientists hanging around during the Big Bang to measure the reactions and their results, and write it all down. They can observe the reactions and rates in the present; but they have only been doing that for the last few hundred years. They think they can trace the results of the Big Bang in the movements of stars and galaxies--but they have only been doing it for a short period of history. The vast majority of what they say is an interpretation--what if it is a wrong interpretation? The assumptions people take into interpreting physical events do influence their interpretations. And sometimes they are wrong.
Here's an example from modern history, one that I am familiar with because of my being on the autism spectrum. The first doctors in the US to notice and study autism, back in the 1940s, decided it must be caused by environmental factors. In fact, Leo Kanner, the first doctor in the US to write about it (and name it) thought it was caused by mothers who were not affectionate enough. That assumption of his drove most of the care and treatment of autism in this country until the 1980s--and still pops up among some psychiatrists today. In contrast, Hans Asperger, working in Vienna in the 1940s, guessed it was genetic--because he noticed the parents of the children he was working with had some of the same traits as the children. But Asperger's writings about his studies were not translated into English until the 1980s. Now it is known that autism is primarily genetic--you get it from your parents! The CDC has a section on autism on its website, that I have seen, that estimates autism is 70-80% genetic. That seems to be the conservative estimate--I have seen mentions of an Italian study that came up at 95%!
It is worth remembering that when Charles Darwin published his book "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, nothing was known about heredity and genetics in the universities in Britain or the US. Gregor Mendl's studies about heredity were not published until later. Microscopes were still quite primitive compared to what they are now. Darwin had no way to know how complex even a single-celled creature is, as shown by our modern equipment. An awful lot of his work, and of those who came after him, was based on pure assumptions, including that law of Uniformity of Natural Causes (in a Closed System) that I mentioned earlier. Before the development of nuclear science that led to the use of Carbon-14 dating, and use of other isotopes for longer periods and other materials, the joke was that geologists used to date rock formations by the fossils found in them, and paleontologists dated fossils by the rocks they were found in! Even to this day, there is a lot of interpretation involved in scientific work.
So remember, there is no such thing as "settled science." It can always change, sometimes unexpectedly. And there are some things it simply cannot account for or explain.
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