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I no longer have enough faith to be an atheist.

I no longer have enough faith to be an atheist. Gil Dodgen. My Background. Son of a brilliant scientist who earned his Ph.D. in physical chemistry in his early 20s while working on the Manhattan A-Bomb Project. Grew up in a small university town surrounded by intellectual atheists.

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I no longer have enough faith to be an atheist.

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  1. I no longer have enough faith to be an atheist. Gil Dodgen

  2. My Background • Son of a brilliant scientist who earned his Ph.D. in physical chemistry in his early 20s while working on the Manhattan A-Bomb Project. • Grew up in a small university town surrounded by intellectual atheists. • Earned three college degrees in a highly secularized academic environment.

  3. I earn my living as a software engineer in aerospace research and development. Hobbies include classical piano and artificial-intelligence computer programming. worldchampionshipcheckers.com

  4. My Father

  5. My father is the most brilliant scientist I have ever known, and, except for the fact that he is an atheist, he is the best Christian man I have ever known.

  6. (How Religion Poisons Everything)

  7. What I Believed • There is no God. Man invented God. God is just a fantasy of human imagination, created to explain what we don’t understand and to provide solace – a psychological crutch. • There is no afterlife. • I am the product of Darwinian evolution, a purposeless, undirected, materialistic process that did not have me in mind.

  8. The obvious implication of this worldview that was clear to me even as a child: Life is ultimately meaningless and pointless. But I figured that this was just the way things are, and I had to learn to live with it.

  9. William Provine, famous historian of science at Cornell University makes my former atheistic conclusions clear, and extrapolates: “Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.”

  10. One Big Problem With Provine’s Thesis Darwinism is in a state of complete logical, evidential, empirical, and mathematical collapse. It is a 19th-century, materialistically-driven ideological fantasy based on complete ignorance of the nature of living systems, which have now been demonstrated to be fundamentally based on the most sophisticated computer program ever “written.”

  11. Christianity as the worldview that inspired scientific discovery: Historian Rodney Stark, in his important book The Victory of Reason writes:“The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians.”

  12. Great Scientists and Christianity Isaac Newton (some consider him to be the greatest scientist of all time) Newtonian Physics, Calculus “It is the perfection of God's works that they are all done with the greatest simplicity. He is the God of order and not of confusion. I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by men who were inspired. I study the Bible daily. This thing [a scale model of our solar system] is but a puny imitation of a much grander system whose laws you know, and I am not able to convince you that this mere toy is without a designer and maker; yet you, as an atheist, profess to believe that the great original from which the design is taken has come into being without either designer or maker! Now tell me by what sort of reasoning do you reach such an incongruous conclusion?”

  13. Johannes Kepler Astronomy/Laws of Planetary Motion “I had the intention of becoming a theologian, but now I see how God is, by my endeavors, also glorified in astronomy, for the heavens declare the glory of God. I am a Christian. I believe only and alone in the service of Jesus Christ. In Him is all refuge, all solace.”

  14. Robert Boyle Founder of Modern Chemistry Governor of a missionary organization for propagating the Gospel in New England. Personally financed the translation of the Bible into Irish, Turkish, and Arabic. Author of The Christian Virtuoso, reflecting on the study of nature for Christians. Author of a Christian devotional book. His will after his death financed the "Boyle Lectures" in defense of Christianity.

  15. Samuel Morse Inventor of the telegraph "Education without religion is in danger of substituting wild theories for the simple commonsense rules of Christianity."

  16. Michael Faraday Inventor of the electric generator and transformer, first described field theory Faraday was hailed by Albert Einstein as the foundation for his own scientific discoveries. "Speculations? I have none. I am resting on certainties. I know Whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day. A Christian finds his guide in the Word of God, and commits the keeping of his soul into the hands of God.”

  17. James Prescott Joule Described the First Law of Thermodynamics: The Law of Conservation of Energy American Biochemist Isaac Asimov said that the First Law of Thermodynamics is “one of the most important generalizations in the history of science.” “It is evident that an acquaintance with natural laws means no less than an acquaintance with the mind of God therein expressed. Order is manifestly maintained in the universe, governed by the sovereign will of God. After the knowledge of, and obedience to, the will of God, the next aim must be to know something of His attributes of wisdom, power, and goodness as evidenced by His handiwork.”

  18. James Clerk Maxwell Statistical thermodynamics, field equations of electricity, magnetism, and light The following is a prayer written by Maxwell and found among his notes: “Almighty God, Who has created man in Thine own image, and made him a living soul that he might seek after Thee, and have dominion over Thy creatures, teach us to study the works of Thy hands, that we may subdue the earth to our use, and strengthen the reason for Thy service; so to receive Thy blessed Word, that we may believe on Him Who Thou has sent, to give us the knowledge of salvation and the remission of our sins. All of which we ask in the name of the same Jesus Christ, our Lord.”

  19. My Conversion to Christianity: A Confluence of Events and Influences • The birth of my first daughter after a long infertility ordeal. We named her after my wife’s sister, who died at the age of 20 months. • A Christian friend, Dave Pounds, whom I greatly admired. • C.S. Lewis and a cartoon video entitled The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which I bought on a whim for my daughter when she was five years old. • The realization (to a great degree thanks to Dave) that the science I once thought put God out of a job and made Him irrelevant, actually made belief in God an inescapable logical conclusion.

  20. A Month-Long Battle: Spiritual Warfare Once all this began I was in a state of complete turmoil. Two Gils argued with each other, all day long. I started listening to Christian radio in the car driving to work, read the Bible every night, and called up Dave to ask questions. One night he prayed for me over the phone, and suggested that I give it a try myself. Once I did, the battle was over. Christ won.

  21. God By The Numbers • + 1 = 2 We’ve invented addition!

  22. The inverse of addition is subtraction: 2 – 1 = 1 Subtract a bigger number from a smaller number and we have negative numbers: 1 – 2 = -1

  23. Repeated addition is multiplication: 2 + 2 + 2 = 2x3 = 6 The inverse of multiplication is division: 6 / 3 = 2

  24. Pure Mathematics: Euler’s Identity and the Beauty of Mathematics as Evidence for the Existence of God The five most important numbers in mathematics: 0 and 1 form the basis of arithmetic. e = 2.7182818284590452353602874713526... (goes on forever and never repeats) e is an irrational number, the natural logarithm base. It appears all over the place, especially in physics and engineering. π = 3.141592653589793238462643383279... (goes on forever and never repeats) π is an irrational number and is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It appears all over the place in mathematics, and is the basis of trigonometry, geometry, and analytical mathematics. I use e and π on a daily basis in my work as a software engineer in aerospace R&D. i is the square root of -1, the imaginary number.

  25. What is an “imaginary” number and what does this have to do with reality and God?

  26. Euler’s Identity Multiply the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter by the imaginary number, then multiply e by itself that number of times (whatever that means), and you get -1. In the second formulation the five most important numbers in all of mathematics are used.

  27. Euler’s Equation Quotes A poll of readers conducted by The Mathematical Intelligencer magazine named Euler's Identity as the “most beautiful theorem in mathematics.” Another poll of readers that was conducted by Physics World magazine in 2004 chose Euler’s Identity tied with Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism as “the greatest equation ever.” After proving Euler’s Identity during a lecture, Benjamin Peirce, a noted American 19th century philosopher / mathematician and a professor at Harvard University, stated that “It is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth.”

  28. My Favorite Quote: A mathematics professor at MIT, an atheist, has said of Euler’s Identity, “There is no God, but if there were, this formula would be proof of His existence.”

  29. The Mathematics of Physics: The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Life The laws of physics that govern the universe can all be described with mathematics. Two examples: Newton’s Second Law of Motion: F = ma (force equals mass times acceleration) Newton’s equation of gravity: F = Gm1m2/r2 This is the inverse square law. Double the distance and the force is reduced by a factor of 4. Triple the distance and the force is reduced by a factor of 9, etc. Why is this?

  30. All the laws of physics must be described exactly as they are by these mathematical formulas, and all the forces and values in physics must be exactly as they are, or life would be impossible. The obvious conclusion is that the universe was designed from the outset for life. This is called “The Anthropic Principle.”(Mention Brandon Carter.)

  31. Anthropic Principle Quotes from Famous Nonbelieving Physicists The famous physicist Paul Davies: “The laws of physics seem themselves to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design. There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the universe. The impression of design is overwhelming."

  32. Physicist Freeman Dyson: “The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.” British astronomer and physicist Sir Fred Hoyle: “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

  33. How fine is this fine-tuning? Imagine a ruler divided into one-inch increments running across the entire universe, a distance of 14 billion light years. This is the distance light travels in 14,000,000,000 years at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. That’s 82,119,744,000,000,000,000,000, or 82 billion trillion miles. Each inch represents a possible value for the force of gravity. Move it one inch either to the right or left, and life would be impossible. All the laws of physics and all the forces of the universe are fine-tuned to this kind of precision in order that life might be possible. (Mention Michael Denton’s Nature’s Destiny.)

  34. With evidence for a Fine-Tuner so obvious, how does the atheist attempt to get out of this? They propose a “multiverse,” as opposed to a universe. Perhaps there is an infinitude of alternate universes, so just by chance ours came out right. Of course, it is argued, we find ourselves in a fine-tuned universe because in any other kind of universe we wouldn’t exist. (Firing squad example.)

  35. Problems With the Multiverse Escape Hatch • There is no evidence for it. • Ockham’s Razor — the law of parsimony, law of economy or law of succinctness — is a basic tenet of science which says that a simple or economical explanation that fits the facts is to be preferred over an unnecessarily complex one. “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity,” is how Ockham put it. The multiverse hypothesis is the ultimate violation of this principle, since it multiplies entities (universes) into infinity. • In any event, it doesn’t solve the problem. The infinite universe-generating machine would have to be fine-tuned to generate universes with our universe’s laws, only with different values. Why wouldn’t it generate universes with no laws at all, or laws that have nothing to do with gravity, etc.? • If there were an infinite number of universes, anything and everything that you could imagine would be certain to occur. A theory that explains everything explains nothing. (Darwinism suffers from this same logical shortcoming.)

  36. Darwinism on its Scientific Deathbed, and Evidence of Design by a Super-Intelligence in Living Systems At the behest of my Christian friend Dave I read Michael Denton’s book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Denton has no theological axe to grind. As best I can figure he is an atheist or at least an agnostic. Upon finishing the book I realized that I had been conned by the “scientific” community. Denton writes:

  37. To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter, so each atom in it would be the size of a tennis ball,and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the portholes of a vast spaceship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. We would see endless highly organized corridors and conduits branching in every direction away from the perimeter of the cell, some leading to the central memory bank in the nucleus and others to assembly plants and processing units. The nucleus itself would be a vast spherical chamber more than a kilometer in diameter, resembling a geodesic dome inside of which we would see, all neatly stacked together in ordered arrays, the miles of coiled chains of the DNA molecules. A huge range of products and raw materials would shuttle along all the manifold conduits in a highly ordered fashion to and from all the various assembly plants in the outer regions of the cell.

  38. We would wonder at the level of control implicit in the movement of so many objects down so many seemingly endless conduits, all in perfect unison. We would see all around us, in every direction we looked, all sorts of robot-like machines… We would see that nearly every feature of our own advanced machines had its analogue in the cell: artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of components, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices used for quality control, assembly processes involving the principle of prefabrication and modular construction… However, it would be a factory which would have one capacity not equaled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours… Unlike our own pseudo-automated assembly plants, where external controls are being continually applied, the cell’s manufacturing capability is entirely self-regulated… [Denton, Michael, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Adler, 1986, pp. 327 – 331.]

  39. “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” — Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859

  40. Michael Behe,Darwin’s Black Box, and Irreducible Complexity Molecular biologist Michael Behe read Denton’s book and had the same reaction I did. In the book Darwin’s Black Box (the cell was once a “black box,” the inner workings of which were entirely unknown in Darwin’s day) Behe makes a compelling case for design in living systems and the insufficiency of the Darwinian mechanism of random mutations (errors) and natural selection* to account for what we find. *Natural selection does not have any creative powers and produces nothing new. Natural selection is death. It only throws stuff out.

  41. Irreducible Complexity Behe coined this term to describe systems which, in order to function at all, must have all their parts in place at once, and cannot be arrived at in a step-by-tiny step fashion, with each step being functional and therefore advantageous, as Darwin’s theory requires. An example is a mousetrap. Until all the parts are in place you don’t catch any mice at all. Natural selection can only select for some feature that gives an organism a survival advantage.

  42. The Bacterial Flagellar Motor “The most efficient motor in the universe.” —Howard Berg, Harvard University

  43. Irreducible Complexity has NOT been “refuted.” It is often claimed that irreducible complexity in living systems has been refuted. In many cases critics simply misrepresent Behe’s definition of IC and claim that he claims that the parts of an IC system cannot serve other functions. This is false. Behe simply claims that all the parts have to be in place at once for the system to function at all. In other cases, critics cite protein sequence similarities between parts of the bacterial flagellum and other proteins. This is completely irrelevant to Behe’s argument.

  44. The Co-Option Hypothesis(Actually, just a story made up out of whole cloth, with no evidence.) It is claimed that the flagellum could have been assembled by “co-opting” parts that originally served another purpose. I wrote the following for Bill Dembski’s Intelligent Design blog: • In order for co-option to produce a bacterial flagellum (for example) all of the component parts must have been present at the same time and in roughly the same place, and all of them must have had other naturally-selectable, useful functions. There is no evidence whatsoever that this ever was the case, or that it ever even could have been the case. • The components would have to have been compatible with each other functionally. A bolt that is too large, too small, or that has threads that are too fine or too coarse to match those of a nut, cannot be combined with the nut to make a fastener. There is absolutely no evidence that this interface compatibility ever existed (between all those imaginary co-opted component parts), or that it even could have existed.

  45. 3) Even if all the parts are available at the same time and in the same place, and are functionally compatible, one can’t just put them in a bag, shake them up, and have a motor fall out. An assembly mechanism is required, and that mechanism must be complete in every detail, otherwise incomplete or improper assembly will result, and no naturally-selectable function will be produced. The assembly mechanism thus represents yet another irreducibly complex hurdle. 4) Last, and perhaps most importantly, assembly instructions are required. Assembly must be timed and coordinated properly. And the assembly instructions must be complete in every detail, otherwise no function will result. This represents an additional irreducibly complex hurdle. Co-option is a demonstrably fantastic story made up out of whole cloth, with absolutely no basis in evidence, and it doesn’t withstand even the most trivial analytical scrutiny. There is not a shred of evidence that this process ever took place, or that it even could have taken place. Worst of all, it requires blind acceptance of the clearly miraculous.

  46. There is a great irony here. This verifiably ridiculous co-option fantasy is presented as “science,” while a straightforward and reasonable inference to design is labeled pseudoscience. The real state of affairs is precisely the reverse.

  47. Huge Improbabilities and Darwinism Life is based on the most sophisticated computer program ever devised. Can you arrive at a computer program through random errors and selection? Clearly not; it is hopelessly improbable. The first computer program every student writes is called a “Hello World” program. It is a simple program that prints “Hello World!” on the screen. Here’s a Hello World program in the C programming language: #include <stdio.h> intmain(void) { printf(“Hello World!\n”); return(0); }

  48. This program includes 66 non-white-space text characters. The C language uses almost every character on the keyboard, but to be generous in my calculations I’ll assume that we only need the 26 lower-case alpha characters. How many 66-character combinations are there? The answer is 26 raised to the 66th power, or 2666. That’s roughly 2.4 x 1093 (1093 is 1 followed by 93 zeros). Recall that there are about 1080 subatomic particles in the known universe, so there are as many 66-character combinations in our example as there are subatomic particles in 24 trillion universes. What is the probability of arriving at our Hello World program by random mutation and natural selection, or of evolving it into another, more complex program that will work and produce meaningful output? There is no chance. Now one might ask, What is the chance of producing, by random mutation and natural selection, the digital computer program that is the DNA molecule, not to mention the protein synthesis machinery and information-processing mechanism, all of which is mutually interdependent for function and survival? The only thing that baffles me is the fact that Darwinists are baffled by the fact that most people don’t buy their blind-watchmaker storytelling.

  49. Bill Dembski’s Explanatory Filter

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