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Posted on 09/23/2026 11:28:04 AM PDT by Heartlander
Twenty years ago, Richard Dawkins published his international best-seller The God Delusion, thus establishing “New Atheism” as a major cultural force. Over the ensuing decade, other authors — such as Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Lawrence Krauss and Daniel Dennett — seized the popular imagination with their respective arguments about why belief in the divine is untenable.
The physicists among them argued that the universe could be explained “from nothing”. The biologists argued that Darwinian explanations of “apparent design” in living organisms make appeals to an actual designing intelligence unnecessary. Thus, Dawkins concluded: “God almost certainly does not exist.”
But now, two decades on, the influence of the New Atheists has waned. Former adherents, most notably Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have repudiated atheism entirely and embraced the Christian faith. Others, such as Alex O’Connor, the hugely popular atheist YouTuber, and Steven Bartlett, the businessman turned podcaster, have moderated their outlooks too. Ironically, even Dawkins admitted in 2024 he feels “at home” in the Christian “ethos” — though he still firmly rejects the existence of God.
As many atheist philosophers (such as the eminent John Gray) have noted, the New Atheists’ philosophical arguments were never very good. Moreover, their arguments seemed strangely anachronistic following many of the great scientific discoveries of the 20th century.
Consider first modern cosmology. Cosmologists have discovered that the universe, contrary to the expectations of those who long portrayed it as eternal, probably had a beginning. Multiple lines of evidence from observational astronomy support this conclusion. Developments in theoretical physics (such as the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, which states that any universe that is expanding – as ours is – cannot be infinite in the...
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
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I have trouble believing a stand of human DNA with 3 billion encoding pairs are in the exact right sequence by random chance.
Dawkins has admitted in being wrong about wanting Christianity destroyed, because he sees that Islam is replacing it, along with the fruits that came from Christianity.
He is still happy to see the destruction of Christianity, however.
Darwin posited that his theory was wrong if you could ever find an organ that could not be divided into small incremental pieces. DNA is Ireducably Complex
No one has ever come up with a legitimate evolutionary process for DNA that doesn’t include - “then a miracle occurs”.
Weak sauce. The fact that there was a (single?) big bang proves nothing.
I have my own preferences of opinions, but they hardly rise to the level of certainty.
It's the ol' Israel, 'wrestles with G_d' thingy.
“I have trouble believing a stand of human DNA with 3 billion encoding pairs are in the exact right sequence by random chance.”
I can understand a DemocRAT with random chance. ;-)
It occurs to me that atheists are such only until they die, Then, it either doesn’t matter anymore (because they were right in their denial of a creator being), or it matters greatly, because they will, at that very moment, discover that there IS a creator being who will prove them quite in error in their former thinking. For them, their eternity will mirror their former lives, only in far less pleasant ways.
On the other hand, theists will be such for all eternity. Their understanding of the nature of that creator will determine what the rest of their eternity will look like - either the same as the atheist, far less pleasant than life was before, or for those who understood what Jesus meant when he said, “No one comes to the Father except through me.”
The chances of one single amino acid chain coming together correctly is on the order of 10EE164. This is more than all the atoms in the observable universe. But you need several chains and other structures to come together simultaneously in a permeable membrane. This has to occur in a perfect organic sea without any contaminants. Mathematically way way beyond impossible.
Darwinian evolution was built on the assumption that a single celled creature is simple. It is not. It is fantastically complex.
In a round-about way, you have laid out Pascal’s wager. Look it up.
Full disclosure -- I used to be an atheist, but I was raised that way.
Do you know how you can tell if someone is an atheist, vegetarian, or jeep owner? They tell you.
A big problem is trying to make science the arbitrer of truth. Science (in the sense of “the sceintific method” as a opposed to merely the study of something) is very useful, but it does not operate in some domains of knowledge. The subject here is rooted in epistemology. Everyone operates MOST of the time according to a belief system and not with some type of scientific decision matrix. Science does not provide the tools to understand everything.
For example, morality is outside of the domain of what science can tell us. Science can tell us that certain things can cause death. But it cannot answer why murder is wrong. If the miraculous exists, science could merely observe miracles and their effects. But it could not explain them by providing any kind of generalization that could make a miracle a predictable event (or it wouldn’t be a miracle but merely a previously unknown aspect of nature). This is not merely a “gap” in the knowledge that science gives us, it is categorically unable to ever fill this gap. (Like God of the gaps, this is the science of the gaps.) Science might give us a supportable (but not provable) framework that explains why humans have a sense of, or capacity for, morality. It might be able to describe a framework that explains why people do not share the same views on a moral issue. But it cannot provide a rigorous, testable means of determining the correct answer to a moral question.
This also goes beyond the miraculous and supernatural because we often rely on non-scientific evidence for life and death decisions. For example, a person can be convicted of murder based on eye witness testimony even if all physical evidence of the crime (that science can evaluate) has been lost or destroyed. When you accept “scientific” research as truthful, you are trusting that no data has been falsified (I’m not referring to falsification of a theory, which may be useful in doing science, but of falsifying data) due to something like the desire to get more grant money or perhaps outright laziness or carelessness. That trust is of the same nature as the trust that a person may put in the claim that hundreds of eye witnesses saw Christ alive after confirming He was dead. And it is no different than believing me when I say I have heard God speak audibly. It’s much better that you have your own encounter with God to know He is real than to take my word for it.
But, within the subject of epistemology we can specifically consider conciousness, as it is VERY relevant to know whether you can trust your own senses. Science relies on the ability to observe. But if your senses are unreliable, how can you do science? Likewise, you have to decide if you were to encounter firsthand evidence of God, could you and would you trust your own senses? I know that God spoke to me not only because I heard Him audibly with my ears, but what He said to me unfolded events in my immediate future that only He could know.
A skeptic with a strong desire to find the truth is very likely to find it. But cynics may never find it because they ignore the possibility that, deep down, they prefer not to know the truth. And science can be a convenient tool of this self-deception. If the argument is right that the deity who created the universe takes a personal interest in us mere mortal humans, you need to ask yourself is such a claim worthy of careful consideration and exploration. Unfortunately, science cannot answer the question of whether this pursuit is worthwhile. You have to answer that for yourself.
The idea of asking what event or experience would disprove Christianity is like me asking you what event or experience would convince you that you don’t have any hands. Well, the existence of your hands is not a scientific theory to be tested. It is an objective fact. It is something you observe, not something you test. If God’s existence is an observable fact, there is no test that changes that reality. Incidentally, people can easily be hypnotized to believe they have no hands. And this underscores the reality that we cannot entirely rely on our own ability to observe reality.
When you explore the latest scientific discoveries, many are pointing to an understanding that the observable universe of time, space, matter, and energy are not the fundamental reality. For example, Donald Hoffman’s Conscious Agent Theory (based on evolutionary theory and not any religious dogma) rejects the underpinning philosophy of science that that people like Dawkins appeal to for their atheism. He treats physicalist naturalism as a fundamental, self-evident axiom, but it cannot be proven or even supported by science. Hoffman took the time to consider his philosophy of science, rejecting this form of naturalism (because of the data his research gathered), in favor of conscious realism, which is a mathematically precise form of scientific idealism. Similar approaches include IIT, Quantum Information Theory, Positive Geometries, and the Holographic Principle. To put it simply, the observable universe is not fundamental. Consciousness is. Our consciousness is not an emergent property of “nature”, but the reverse is true. The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for providing empirical proof that the universe is not locally real. And this fact further supports Hoffman’s assertion that materialism is itself uncientific.
I’m not pointing all of this out to assert that scientific inquiry will necessarily lead you to God. Maybe it can, or maybe it will not. But drawing attention to consciousness is highly relevant and apropros to this discussion. Trying to discover the truth of God or the specific claims of the Bible by applying the scientific method is impossible in the same way that the scientific method cannot prove an underlying axiom or philosophical assumption. If these things are true (and they are), the validity of science as a means of gaining knowledge of the universe is the result of God creating the visible universe and the laws that govern it, equipping us with minds for exploring it, and a time and place in history where the world in which we live is not only fine tuned for life but for this exploration. For example, there are testable facts about the universe that we were able to discover because the moon is precisely proportionate to our sun. Our understanding of the universe would be drastically diminished if our planet was fine tuned to support life but had an atmosphere that prevented us from seeing anything beyond it.
But at the end of the day, there is something more at stake on this subject than mere intellectual curiosity. You must decide if the pursuit of God, to know experientially whether He is real and what His true nature is, is important enough for you to find out for yourself.
Everything you can see with your eyes is experiential evidence of God.
There were heated debates on FR about evolution. Anyone critical was labeled a creationist, much as anyone critical of mRNA shots is labeled an “antivaxxer.”
Restricting ourselves to the fossil record, Darwin said that anyone who thought the fossil record was anywhere near complete had to reject his theory. This created a prejudice for the theory that was contrary to the evidence. In effect he was saying that you should have faith in the theory of evolution. The fossils would be found. At some point, dogma set in that the fossil evidence actually gave strong support for the theory.
A clever evolutionist at FR said that every time a new transitional fossil was found, creationists declared that there was one more gap!
Gould and Etheridge challenged the standard evolutionist claim that the fossil record was adequate:
“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.”
It seems like they were saying that “creationists” were right all along. From Darwin to Gould and Etheridge and everything in-between, the absence of transitional fossils counts against Darwin’s theory.
You might have expected that Gould and Etheridge would have driven out of their respective professions. Not so! The two men had a new theory of evolution and they both mocked “creationists.” They took the “right side,” which counts for more than the evidence with our scientific community.
It some ways your post mirrors Pascal’s Wager.
Every argument for atheism in history necessarily uses circular reasoning.
That is, the logic of all such arguments begins not with open inquiry, but with a denial of God’s existence.
I suppose it is ironic in a way that the scientific method almost can't be used to prove itself wrong, because proving something false is usually the criteria of proof itself.
I suppose it is as sound as any method ever devised to find truth, but it is limiting in a way that will cut off a lot of possibilities.
I think a lot of people who claim they are ‘atheists’ are just unable to accept the concepts of God that are presented in organized religions.
A lot of them are probably more properly designated ‘agnostic’.
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