Oh yes, dearest sister in Christ, I can testify to that! Certain Darwinist correspondents always absolutely refused to see what was patently obvious to others: That their confidence in the success of science in some (possibly remote) future to explain the (so-far) unexplainable IS a "faith statement." Such folks were true believers, accolytes of an ersatz-religion, Darwinism. At bottom, all their claims rested on faith, the principle claim being that there is no-God, either to begin or sustain the natural world in any way, shape, or form.
That is, they constantly propounded the idea that our world and the entire Universe can be exhaustively explained on the basis of naturalistic principles alone. The Supernatural is denied on principle.
Evidently such folks do not even bother to inquire into the authority on which those same naturalistic principles must rest for their own validity. They simply do not ask this question. Which to me simply provides additional evidence that their entire quasi-religious edifice is grounded in pure faith.
Atheism requires the plenitude argument, that anything that can happen, did. They lost the steady state universe model but must have hope in an infinity past in order to consider themselves bright in denying God the Creator.If one's "doctrine" requires one to deny God, then I suppose any substitute will do to fill in the resultant Void. Why not space aliens? Yeah, that's right! LOLOL!
It's a shell game. We are not fooled or amused.
By the way, we see similar goalpost moving in the reaction to the unexplained phenomenum of information content of DNA. Here they appeal to panspermia. In effect, if it cannot be explained by material/efficient cause on earth then appeal to alien seeding for final cause. IOW, they are saying that "aliens are ok in a clinch, but the word "God" is obscene and not to be mentioned in public..."
In the absence of space, things cannot exist.So in effect, evidently to keep the religious at bay the physical cosmologists popularized variations of the multiple universe theories, e.g. this universe was spawned from a previous one which was spawned from a previous one and so on. The theories amount to nothing more than "moving the goalpost" — relegating the issue of the beginning of space and time to some prior universe.In the absence of time, events cannot occur.
Both space and time are required for physical causation.
Thank you ever so much, dearest sister in Christ, for your extraordinarily illuminating essay/post!
P.S.: Dearest sister in Christ, just one further observation. Here you give a splendid illustration of the problem of Infinite Regression. I understand that, in mathematics, if one obtains an infinite regression as a result, this is usually a sign that there is something dreadfully "wrong" about one's equations....
Aristotle proposed that nothing could be either knowable or meaningful under a universal condition of infinite causal regression. Which is probably why he introduced the idea of a primal First Cause — the Unmoved Mover which causes the Cosmos to exist. He argued that, among other things, reason itself would be impossible absent a first-cause Origin of the Cosmos.