By Jason Charles on 9/18/2019 (4 years 214 days ago) Atheism/Secularism
I love an impossible challenge, and apparently so did martyred pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who pointed out that God would not be much of a God, if one could conjure him up prostrate like a material idol.
“A God who let us prove his existence would be an idol” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
A Flawed Argument
Atheists love demanding proof of God’s existence. The criteria for proof is always physical evidence; we must test it, analyze it, demonstrate it in the lab, and we want peer-reviewed studies of this God. And if you can’t put it on a microscope slide, shake it inside a test tube or look at it in a telescope then it isn’t God, and is rejected as spiritual hyperbole. The funny thing is, this argument assumes you can just grab a hunk of “God” and slap it under a microscope. An obviously flawed and very foolish line of reasoning, but this has become a universal assumption proposed by atheists anymore. They create the strawman “god” and then demand the strawman jumps through hoops for our entertainment and satisfaction.
The dictionary itself disagrees with these atheist assumptions of God,
Definition of ‘god’ (Source: Websters Dictionary)
1 capitalized : the supreme or ultimate reality: such as
a: the Being perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness who is worshipped as creator and ruler of the universe
God is defined as a supreme creator and rule maker, and if God sets one of those rules as personal untestability than who are we to differ as subjects of those rules. Try as we might, we can’t conjure up God.
There are only two ways we can determine if God is real, one if He reveals Himself willingly to mankind, and two if we can infer natural laws and order as evidence of a supreme law maker and God.
So, if you accept the Bible as evidence, and God has indeed revealed Himself to creation, then your personal criteria has been satisfied, congratulations you are now a theist. But for the secularist who rejects the Bible as evidence for a God, then you really only have one choice left, and that is to become a naturalist and look for evidence of a God within that framework of naturalism, a framework that ironically limits God to the false assumption, “only believe what you can test.”
Testing the Impossible
So, where does that leave a secularist? What tools do they have left at their disposal to prove the existence of God, especially considering we just proved that a materialistic test is insufficient and fails to provide an adequate framework for testing God.
The answer is the use of reason. They are left looking at the natural world, building data sets, and then extrapolating that info into the microcosm and macrocosm of creation. These data sets provide the means to extrapolate information, and thus come to conclusions on things currently at the limitations and scope of human knowledge.
Cosmologists, and other scientific disciplines are constantly doing this, they take the smallest shift in light, on the faintest star in the sky and superimpose all sorts of unproven, purely speculative meaning onto that data. For example the hyper-speculation surrounding Boyajians star,
“Star KIC 8462852, or Boyajian's star (also nicknamed "Tabby's star," for astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, who led the team that first detected the star's fluctuations), has demonstrated an irregular cycle of growing dimmer and then returning to its previous brightness. These changes were first spotted in September 2015 using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, which was built to observe these kinds of dips in a star's brightness, because they can be caused by a planet moving in front of the star as seen from Earth.
…
Scientists have hypothesized that the changes could be due to a swarm of comets passing in front of the star, that they're the result of strong magnetic activity, or that it's some massive structure built by aliens.” (Space.com)
This is literally what they do, observe a small dip in light in a far away star, then specualate a planet passing in front of it, or a giant orbiting, alien superstructure. This is what is accepted as “science.” The standard of proof for the cosmologist is wild speculation, but the standard of proof for a theologist is an impossible test. It is complete hypocrisy.
Compounding Intelligence
So, if science allows us the liberty of extrapolating out information to such a degree that a flicker in the night sky means ‘alien superstructure’ then we two can use this principle, apply it to the natural world, and demonstrate a proof for God.
Now we may not be able to detect God in any unit of measurement, but we can make assumptions by what we find in the natural world.
One truth we all can be sure of is life exists. It exists from the smallest virus and then exponentially grows in complexity, expressing itself in the form of hyper-intelligent creatures called humans.
What we can actually observe is the fact that there is a arc of complexity moving from super simple virus like life-forms to hyper-complex multi-celluar life-forms. So, in true scientific form the data set we observe in the natural world shows a trend of complexity from the micro to the macro that grows in complexity, and if we continue to extrapolate based on the actual observable data then it stands to reason that consciousness doesn’t stop with human kind and continues into unobservable realms, and even so far as bumping into a supreme super consciousness.
Conclusion
This is a reasonable assumption, per the scientific standard of testing and conclusions. For lack of a better term, I call this proof test the Law of Compounding intelligence. If we observe some of the smallest life forms in existence and some of the most complex, then we can reasonably suppose that this complexity continues to extend into the infinite on the macroscale.
The position that God is so far up that chain that we can’t even comprehend the complexities is actually a more reasonable position than assuming that God doesn’t exist at all, especially when you account for the obvious complexities that allow for our own existence.
Scientists are very okay with other life forms, they spend billions of dollars annually looking for life outside our solar system. Anything and everything observed get’s exaggerated in an effort to get the public to accept the probability and possibility of alien life. What they can’t accept is the idea that God created everything in the first place. That line of thinking comes bundled with to much accoutability the scientific establishment would love to avoid, and is why they will always prefer the Big Bang and evolutionary model. When they are killing babies, and genetically modifying lifeforms, and cloning humans accountability is the last thing they will provide room for in their worldview.
Then when you consider the fact that quantum theory, string theory and even multiverse theory are proposed because scientists have to start accounting for the unseen dimensions then we realize that the allowance or disallowance of God is not so much because that it is untestable and can’t be modeled, but because they simple don’t want to accommodate the thought of God.
Their own models provide for space where an infinite creator could escape our probes and tests, but they still refuse to acknowledge the possibility of a God. This is why we can’t accept the conclusions of the scientific realm on the existence of God. They present strawman arguments, and refuse to address the fact that their own models account for extraterrestrial life, and unseen dimensions of reality, but hey don’t talk about God. Seems the denial of God is more politically motivated and funding motivated, scientists should be up in arms about these limits on their hypothesis and thinking. Secularism and naturalism is a jail for the mind and because of the money scientists need to operate with they willingly accept limits on their intellectual freedom.
When you take into account these things you realize very quickly the scientific community has a credibility crisis, they are all about possibilities and answers except when it comes to the question or possibility of God. That is the moment their supposed open mind, and inquisitive nature shuts down. It reminds me of the dialog that Job had with God in Job 38, God mocks human finite measurements, asking, where were you when he created the world?
“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.”-Job 38:4
The fact is they don’t have understanding, and they can’t declare it, because they don’t want to admit that like Job God will demand accountability out of them. Their framework is nothing but an artifical limit on creativity and thinking, even the bronze age people of the past were not limited, and free to think about these things unabated, but modern scientist will be chastised, funding cut, and ridiculed for constructing cosmological models that inculde the possiblity of God. That is defacto mental slavery, and all we can do is feel sorry for those trapped in such a worthlessly limited mode of thinking and understanding.
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