I love secularists! They make the Christian apologist’s job so easy. For the last few hundred years of Western civilization, intellectuals and cultural elites have painted the inevitable ark of history as secularism. Full stop. As scientific knowledge increased average people would come to see religion and God as increasingly implausible and untenable. It is debatable about when this move toward atheism/materialism (the material is all that exists) started, but it is a supreme irony of history that it really gained momentum when a pious orthodox Catholic French philosopher, Renes Decartes, developed his work of philosophy as a defense against the growing atheism of the 17th century. The details of how this happened are not important for the this post, but once the starting point became man (cogito ergo sum) not God, and epistemology not metaphysics (how we know not what is the nature of reality), the jig was up. The absolute secularism of Western culture we are experiencing with a vengeance in 2019 was inevitable. But a funny thing has happened on the way to the secularists’ party: reality is crashing it!
I thought of this disappointing flow of history, for the secularists, when I read the title of this post which comes from a Forbes article on how fortunate we are that the early universe, specifically how our sun’s rotation was just right to allow life on earth to arise:
Our early Sun’s rate of rotation may be one reason we’re here to talk about it, astrobiologists now say. The key likely lies in the fact that between the first hundred million to the first billion years of its life, our G-dwarf star likely had a ‘Goldilocks’ rotation rate; neither too slow nor too fast.
Instead, its hypothetical ‘intermediate’ few days rate of rotation guaranteed our Sun was active enough to rid our newly-formed Earth of its inhospitable, hydrogen-rich primary atmosphere. This would have enabled a more habitable, secondary atmosphere composed of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and oxygen to eventually form.
If it had been a ‘fast’ (less than one day rotator), our Sun might have continually stripped our young planet of its secondary atmosphere as well. However, if it took more than 10 days to rotate, it might not have been active enough to strip Earth of its hypothetical primary atmosphere.
These kinds of discoveries, increasing it seems as fast as the universe itself is expanding, are really messing with the secularist narrative. In the 19th century because scientific knowledge was limited, it was possible, or at least plausible enough, to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, as Richard Dawkins said evolution allowed him to be. The hubris of Western intellectual elites in the 19th century, that human speculative reason could figured out the nature of reality, is breathtaking to behold. Then the “unsinkable” Titanic sunk on April 14, 1912. Uh oh! Then on June 28, 1914 Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, and the unimaginable, and unexplainable, horrors of World War I happened. Double uh oh! And WWI led to the Russian Revolution, to Hitler and WWII, to Stalin and Mao and world wide communism, and death and destruction on a hitherto unimaginable scale. This was not the fruit of the Enlightenment its proponents were expecting. The moral argument for life without God wasn’t working out so well.
At the same time this was all happening, a disheveled German Jew named Albert Einstein was in the process of making Newton passe, and revealing that maybe the universe wasn’t so predictable after all, that it wasn’t a big, giant machine man could control. Then something really disconcerting for the secularists happened: the theory of the Big Bang. Triple uh oh! If the universe, space and time itself, had a beginning, then . . . . maybe this religious stuff isn’t so fanciful after all. In fact, initially the term Big Bang was pejorative, like it was a Big Joke. My best friend and I laughed out loud at something we read in a recent Wall Street Journal book review about a new book called Earth-Shattering: Violent Supernovas, Galactic Explosions, Biological Mayhem, Nuclear Meltdowns, and Other Hazards to Life in Our Universe by Bob Berman. Here was the paragraph that gave us great mirth:
Mr. Berman deftly explains the current scientific consensus about the Big Bang’s cause, history and structure. And he is forthright about what still puzzles most scientists about it, such as “why an entire universe as small as a mustard seed abruptly materialized out of nothingness.” The author also introduces us to one of the book’s motifs: that mind-boggling calamities can end up bestowing great benefits. “The catastrophic destruction of stars, planets, and galactic neighborhoods,” Mr. Berman writes, “like most other cataclysms, creates more good than harm.”
Shazam! Boy did we get lucky! These kind of cosmic “coincidences” could be piled one upon another for a very long time.
You can go from the biggest of pictures to the smallest, and the radius blast to the secular narrative is nuclear bomb wide. I heard a podcast this week of a Dr. Robert Carter talking about the nature of the amazing human DNA. It is, to not put too fine a point on it, insane! In the 19th century Darwin and his fans thought the human cell was a simple blob of matter, not what we now know is a ridiculously complex machine that makes human life possible. As the cosmic “coincidences” multiply, it becomes increasingly, glaringly obvious that matter and time cannot account for what we actually find in nature. The intricacy, the mind-numbing complexity, the incredible finely tuned nature of literally everything, can only be the result of an infinitely creative intelligence who has the power to pull it all off. These words of the Apostle Paul are even more obviously true now then when he first penned them:
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . .
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