United with Christ
Session 7
Last week, we started talking about Dr. Frank Turek’s book, “Stealing from God,” in which Frank shows how atheists and skeptics have to use things they “steal” from God in order to try and prove their ideas. Since stealing is a crime, Turek uses the acrostic “CRIMES” to show how wrong what the atheists do really is.
Last week, we looked at the first three letters: C – Causality, R – Reason, and I – Information and intentionality, and saw how atheists try to use things from each to disprove God. This week, we’ll continue by looking at the last three letters, Morality, Evil, and Science.
Morality
“You can know what a book says while denying there’s an author. But there would be no book to know unless there was an author. Likewise, atheists can know objective morality while denying God exists, but there would be no objective morality unless God exists.” (87)
Everyone has instinctive or intuitive awareness of right and wrong. It’s hardwired into our very souls! But atheism has no explanation for this at all. They say we evolved it because it somehow promoted our survival. But that doesn’t make sense, because sometimes, people do things that are dangerous to their own survival, like trying to rescue people in raging or ice-choked rivers or burning houses. How could that have evolved? It’s against our survival, yet we all think it honorable and noble.
If we are all the results of nothing more than accidental, blind chance, then justice, morality, and free will don’t really exist. They’re just illusions of our minds. So murderers and rapists aren’t really bad people. They can’t help what they do, since they’re just products of their molecular makeup. But everybody just instinctively knows this is wrong!
“In order to hold people morally responsible for their actions, atheists need to steal morality and free will from God. Imagine a society that didn’t hold people responsible for their actions. There would be no civilization. The moral implications of atheism are unlivable.” (92)
It’s pretty telling that even Richard Dawkins says he’s anti-Darwinian when it comes to how we should organize our lives and our morality, because Darwinism is “ruthless.” So even though he thinks we all “dance to our DNA,” he hypocritically says we shouldn’t follow our DNA (the same thing Christians say.)
Frequently, we hear atheists saying something or other is immoral. (American Atheist David Silverman said it would be immoral to leave a child in an orphanage rather than have him/her adopted by homosexuals.) But when they do that they’re stealing from God, because under atheism, there is no absolute morality.
“Morality isn’t made of molecules. What does justice weigh? What is the chemical composition of courage? How much hydrogen is in the honesty molecule? Did Hitler just have bad molecules? These are absurd questions because moral standards aren’t made of molecules. To have an objective standard of justice, you don’t need molecules – you need an objective, unchanging Judge who has supreme authority.” (97)
How would the world have judged the Nazis at Nuremburg if there is no objective standard of right and wrong? How could one type of society say another type of society is wrong? Might would make right and that’s all there is to it. The winners would judge the losers. But everybody just knows the Nazis were horribly wrong!
We’re not saying atheists don’t have any morals. They could be very great people with instinctively good morals. But what we’re saying is, they have no basis or reason for their morality, so they’re really not living in agreement with what they say they believe. They’re stealing their values from God without realizing it.
People like atheist Sam Harris try to argue that we can come to an objective morality by human reason alone, but it just doesn’t work. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol-Pot, they all reasoned themselves into the conclusion that it was best to murder millions of people, and those murders helped their own survival. Reason isn’t good enough. There has to be a standard beyond us. That standard is God.
People say, “You can’t legislate morality.” But we do it all the time! When we create laws to say stealing, murder, kidnapping, or rape are wrong, we’re legislating morality. The only question is, whose morality are we using to legislate? We used to base everything on the constitution, saying it was our highest authority and justices needed to draw out its authors’ “original intent.” Now, everything is fluid and changing, and laws are invented out of thin air, like the right to privacy meaning unlimited abortion and same-sex marriage. That’s why our culture is changing so fast and everything is so unstable.
If atheism is true, the whole concept of rights goes out the window! What rights? Who gives us rights? The founders said we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. If there is no Creator, there are no unalienable rights! There is no absolute and objective morality. But atheists are always claiming to know what is right and wrong and moral or immoral. When they do, they’re stealing from God! (And by the way, many of them believe in their own morality, but hate Christian morality, and that’s why they are anti-God. It’s not just intellectual; it’s volitional.)
Evil
Many atheists believe the existence of evil is the biggest problem for theists. If there’s an all-powerful, all-good God, why is there so much evil and suffering in the world? Either He isn’t all-powerful, or He isn’t all-good. It’s not possible for Him to be both. They think they have us with this. But the truth is, evil is a worse problem for atheists than for theists!
Atheists act like only Christians have to explain evil. The truth is, every worldview has to! We have an explanation that makes plenty of sense. They don’t! Why? First of all, because if there’s no objective standard of good and evil, right and wrong, then how can atheists even say anything is evil in the first place? They can’t!
But they try to use the existence of evil and suffering to attack the notion of God. How could there be a God like the Christians believe in, if He allows all this terrible stuff to go on, and even promotes it?! They can’t have it both ways! Either there is no such thing as evil, injustice, immorality, or there is. But in order for evil to exist, good must. Why?
Evil isn’t really a thing of its own. It’s like darkness compared to light. Darkness isn’t negative light of some kind. It’s just the absence of light. Evil is like rust in a car. If you take the rust out of the car, you have a better car. But if you take the car out of the rust, you have nothing. Evil is a negation of good. We say a person is unjust, unfair, immoral, etc., and we can say such things because there are such things as justice, fairness, and morality. “So evil can’t exist unless good exists. But good can’t exist unless God exists. In other words, there can be no objective evil unless there is objective good, and there can be no objective good unless God exists. If evil is real – and we all know it is – then God exists. We could put it this way: The shadows prove the sunshine. There can be sunshine without shadows, but there can’t be shadows without sunshine. In other words, there can be good without evil, but there cannot be evil without good; and there can’t be objective good without God. So evil may show there is a devil out there, but it can’t disprove God. Evil actually boomerangs back to show that God exists. ” (117, 118)
C.S. Lewis said, “As an atheist, my argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?” (118)
Atheists like to blast believers about the crimes done in God’s name, like the Crusades or the murder of abortionists. But they steal from God when they say these things are evil! At the same time, they are suspiciously silent when it comes to evil done because of atheism, as with Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc. Oh, they were just crazy or megalomaniacal. Their atheism had nothing to do with anything! But communists insisted on atheism as part of their revolution. Hitler used evolution as an excuse for killing Jews. If we all evolved by chance and are nothing more than collections of molecules, then killing millions of us for the common good is justifiable! Yes, evil is a problem for Christians, but it’s a much worse problem for atheists, and they have no good news about how to explain it, face it, handle it, or turn it to good!
Science
To say that a scientist can disprove God is like saying a mechanic can disprove Henry Ford! While there is certainly evidence from science to support theism, the most important point for this chapter is not that science supports theism, but that theism supports science. In other words, theism makes doing science possible. We wouldn’t be able to do science reliably if atheism were true.
Turek reviews the O. J. Simpson murder trial of 1994, and lays out the incredible case the prosecutors had based on the evidence of blood alone. Five facts about it are reviewed: Simpson’s blood was found at the scene of the crime. The blood of Ron Goldman, Nicole Brown and O. J. were all found in O. J.’s Ford Bronco. The bloody left glove found at the crime scene had blood from Goldman, Brown and Simpson, and matched the glove found at Simpson’s house. Simpson was seen wearing that brand of gloves from 1990 through the time of the murders. The bloody footprints found at the scene matched a rare type of Bruno Magli size 12 shoes that Simpson owned. Only 299 pairs were sold in the U.S. Brown’s blood was on O. J.’s socks, which had about 20 stains of blood. The blood had the DNA characteristics that only 1 in 9.7 billion Caucasians would have, meaning Brown was probably the only person in the world who had that type of blood.
All this evidence was so strong, it seemed there was no way Simpson would get off. But he did! And a survey done ten years later showed that 77% of the general population thought Simpson was guilty. But when divided racially, 87% of whites thought him guilty, and only 29% of blacks! What could account for this huge difference? A different worldview. Blacks might be more prone to believe there was racism involved and Simpson was set up by the LAPD because of being black. Whites, being less likely to have suffered racism, did not see things that way. The point here is that people can look at the same evidence and come to different interpretations, different conclusions as to what it means. (The civil trial a few years later found Simpson guilty.)
Atheists and theists look at the same world, the same research, the same scientific evidence, and come to totally different conclusions about it, because of their different worldviews. They don’t differ on most issues, like the science of electricity or nuclear power or chemistry. What we differ on is the issue of origins, both in astronomy and biology. There is such a thing as operational science, and origins science, and they’re very different. Origins are not observable or repeatable. So the study of them must be like forensic science. You can’t rewind and show the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman. We can’t rewind and see the Civil War or other events of history. Likewise, we can’t see the creation of the universe or the first life. That requires forensic science.
Some scientists try to define science as only what can be observed, measured empirically, etc. But that would imply that archeology, cryptology and forensic or criminal science, or for that matter, even the study of history or of evolution could not be scientific, since we cannot redo these things and observe them.
Sir Francis Bacon said, “true knowledge is knowledge by causes.” (149) So when we “do” science, we are trying to find out what caused a particular effect. As we saw last time, the law of causality is fundamental to all science. Well, there are only two kinds of causes in the universe, if you think about it – natural and unnatural or intelligent causes. If you look at the Grand Canyon, you know it was caused by natural causes. If you look at Mount Rushmore, you know that had to be caused by an intelligent cause. Why do you know this? Because all the evidence we’ve ever experienced anywhere and at any time in the world makes it clear that a highly organized and carefully shaped set of features like the presidents heads on Mount Rushmore never happens by purely natural causes like rain and erosion!
This is where the different worldviews of scientists lead to different conclusions. Theists accept both intelligent and natural causes, but atheists only accept natural ones. So they rule out any possibility of intelligent design from the get-go when they look at the universe. They call this “the rule,” and by that, they mean, the rule of methodological naturalism. Hypocritically, they insist it be applied to all science while not doing so consistently themselves. They don’t look at Mt. Rushmore and say it must’ve happened by natural processes, neither do they say this with regard to arrowheads, architectural structures, or things like the Rosetta Stone. But they sure want to insist on it when talking about the origin of the universe or of life! Geologists, archeologists, or detectives don’t rule out intelligent causes in advance. But many biologists do. In fact, many insist that what looks like a design is actually only an illusion!
The truth is that all science began in a theistic worldview and most of the greatest scientists of all time have been believers. Science is only possible because a God of order designed the universe in an orderly way we could figure out, and designed our minds so we could discover and comprehend it, and even put us in the universe where He did so we could slowly discover all these things and marvel at His handiwork.
Unfortunately, today, atheistic, materialistic, naturalistic scientists want to use science as a means to “prove” there can be no God. When they do that, they are stealing what God gave us to try to disprove Him! While constantly relying on “natural laws” to explain things, they refuse to recognize that “laws imply a Lawgiver”!
If you were asked to explain a Ford motorcar by saying what explains it is either Henry Ford or the laws of internal combustion, wouldn’t you have to admit that both are necessary? You have to have an inventor/creator, but of course, the laws of internal combustion explain how it works. Likewise, we have the laws of nature, but we also need an explanation for them, and for the beginning of all things. God is that explanation!
A brilliant example Turek uses is that of a metal detector. Imagine trying to use one to find something made out of wood, plastic, or rubber. Metal detectors can’t do that! But that doesn’t mean wood, plastic, or rubber don’t exist! In fact, rubber and plastic parts are used in the making of metal detectors!
Metal detectors are great, for the purpose for which they were created. Likewise, science is great, but it cannot discover everything or explain everything. It’s ironic, but atheists claim to be so rational and scientific, but they are blind. The good science they do wouldn’t be possible if there were no God, and they refuse to accept the limitations of science. They steal from God to make their points, not knowing they are really only proving God.
As we’ve seen, most of what atheists use to disprove God came from God. How much better to accept this wonderful God, submit to Him and live for Him? He is the best explanation for the universe and life itself.