Read Nothing Created Everything: The Scientific Impossibility of Atheistic Evolution Online
Authors: Ray Comfort
Tags: #Chrisitian
Nothing Created Everything: The Scientific Impossibility of Atheistic Evolution (4 page)
HALLENGE TO A
P
ROFESSOR
P. Z. Myers, a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, was a little upset by my definition of what an atheist believes. The statement is a huge dilemma for the professor, because he knows that only a fool could believe the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything. He can’t say that the universe is eternal, because he knows that it’s not. So he is left with the predicament of having to admit that
something
created everything. Professor Myers believes in a Creator of some sort; he just doesn’t know its identity. He may be a professor of atheism, but he is in truth just an agnostic. So he defaults to the predictable “Well, who made God then?” This is what he said: “And of course, he doesn’t bother with this problem: who made God? I
can guess how he’d respond: there was no ‘who,’ and God wasn’t ‘made.’ At which time we do a little judo move and point out that the universe wasn’t ‘made’ by a ‘who,’ either.”
Here now is a big mystery. He doesn’t know how the universe got here, but he somehow knows that the Creator wasn’t a “who.” How does he know that? Does he have some inside information? I would like to hear it. How does he know that a “who” wasn’t involved in creation? Even Richard Dawkins knows better. He’s a little more careful with his wording, with his “Why There Almost Certainly is no God.”
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If you are familiar with the first law of thermodynamics, then you should be familiar with the second law. It tells us that it is scientifically impossible for the universe to be eternal. Everything degenerates. Leave an apple on a table for a few weeks and it will rot. Leave a rock for a billion years and it will turn to dust. If the universe were eternal (trillions and trillions-plus years old) it would have turned to dust. So now you are back to the question of what caused the universe in the beginning. If you say that there was no first cause (a Creator), then you are stuck with the unscientific and thoughtless belief that nothing created everything. So, what is it that you believe? Is it that something created everything? Then you are not an atheist because you believe in a Creator. Or do you believe that nothing created it? There is no in-between.
Do atheists believe that nothing created everything? See for yourself that this is not some fringe group:
• “It is now becoming clear that everything can—and probably did—come from nothing.” —Robert A. J. Matthews, physicist, Ashton University, England
• “Space and time both started at the Big Bang and therefore there was nothing before it.” —Cornell University Ask an Astronomer
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• “Even if we don’t have a precise idea of exactly what took place at the beginning, we can at least see that the origin of the universe from nothing need not be unlawful or unnatural or unscientific.” —Paul Davies, physicist, Arizona State University
• “Assuming the universe came from nothing, it is empty to begin with…Only by the constant action of an agent outside the universe, such as God, could a state of nothingness be maintained. The fact that we have something is just what we would expect if there is no God.” —Victor J. Stenger, atheist, professor of physics, University of Hawaii. Author of
God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist
• “Few people are aware of the fact that many modern physicists claim that things—perhaps even the entire universe— can indeed arise from nothing via natural processes.” —”Creation
ex nihilo
—Without God (1997),” atheist, Mark I. Vuletic
• “To understand these facts we have to turn to science. Where did they all come from, and how did they get so darned outrageous? Well, it all started with nothing.” —”Fifty Outrageous Animal Facts,” Animal Planet
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• “To the average person it might seem obvious that nothing can happen in nothing. But to a quantum physicist, nothing is, in fact, something.”—
Discover Magazine
“Physics & Math / Cosmology”
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• “Some physicists believe our universe was created by colliding with another, but Kaku [a theoretical physicist at City University of New York] says it also may have sprung from nothing…” —Scienceline.org
• “It is rather fantastic to realize that the laws of physics can describe how everything was created in a random quantum fluctuation out of nothing, and how over the course of 15 billion years, matter could organize in such complex ways that we have human beings sitting here, talking, doing things intentionally.” —Alan Harvey Guth theoretical physicist and cosmologist,
Discover Magazine
, April 1, 2002
C• “If symmetry is perfect on a cosmic scale, the total amount of energy in the universe is actually zero. Does this mean that nothing caused the universe? If our universe is an absolute zero, absolutely nothing seems required to cause it! Is our universe such an ultimate absolute accident? Is it nothing that was caused by nothing for no reason at all? Extreme Big Accident Cosmology answers affirmatively. This cosmology is advocated by Quantum Cosmologists like Edward P. Tryon, Peter Atkins, A. Vilenkin, Victor J. Strenger, Quentin Smith, and a few others for whom the origin of our universe was a stupendous accident, having no cause whatsoever.” —R.B. Edwards,
What Caused the Big Bang?
page 163
ARICATURED
S
OPHISTICATION
R.C. Sproul said:
Some modern theorists believe that the world was created by nothing. Note the difference between saying that the world was created
from
nothing and saying that the universe was created
by
nothing. In this modern view the rabbit comes out of the hat with no rabbit, a hat, or even a magician. The modern view is far more miraculous that the biblical world view. It suggests that nothing created something. More than that, it holds that nothing created everything—quite a feat
indeed! Now surely there aren’t serious people who are running around in this scientific age claiming that the universe was created by nothing, are there? Yes, scores of them. To be sure, they don’t say it quite the way I have said it, and they would probably be annoyed with me for stating their views in such a manner. They’d undoubtedly protest that I have given a distorted caricature of their sophisticated position. OK. True—they don’t say that the universe was created by nothing; they say that the universe was created by chance. But chance is no thing. It has no weight, no measurements, no power. It is merely a word we use to describe mathematical possibilities. It can do nothing. It can do nothing because it is nothing. To say that the universe was created by chance is to say that it came from nothing. That is intellectual madness.
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H
OW
D
ID
L
IFE
B
EGIN
?
E
VOLUTION TELLS
us that life evolved from something. However, the question may be asked where rocks came from. Rocks are not “life.” They don’t have a brain or a heart, lungs, or blood. Rocks don’t reproduce themselves, unless you call breaking in half “reproduction.” A rock doesn’t fit into the normal definition of life. So where did they come from? The evolutionary explanation is that suns exploded and cooled down over billions of years. Hence, rocks. Ask then where did the suns come from and you will hear that all of them started from a tiny “dot” that is smaller than a period at the end of a sentence. Ask where the dot came from and they will say that they don’t know. The origin of life to the Genesisophobic is the big mystery. Still, that doesn’t stop them from having ideas. Ask A Scientist answers the question of life’s origin this way:
The origin comes from these general ideas:
1) Space origin—meteorites, etc.—we have found amino acids, building molecules of nucleic acids and water in meteorites.
2) Organic soup and the heterotrophic hypothesis—Urey-Miller experiment and the idea that some chemical began to rob energy from other molecules in the hypothetical organic soup. Coacervate experiments back this up by providing an idea of how cells formed.
3) Cairns (and others) Ideas of chemical determination in clay —this is backed up somewhat by finding life in rocks three miles into the crust.
4) There are others. Of course the pseudoscience ideas are always thrown in by religious interests, but of course are not substantiated by scientific investigations.
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Notice that any thought that God could be the genesis of life is dismissed as pseudoscience. He doesn’t know how life began, but he
does
know that God had nothing to do with it.
When Andrew Knoll, professor of biology at Harvard was asked, “How does life form?” he responded, “The short answer is we don’t really know how life originated on this planet. There have been a variety of experiments that tell us some possible roads, but we remain in substantial ignorance.”
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Time
magazine said:
This summer a startling, if still sketchy, synthesis of the new ideas emerged during a weeklong meeting of origin-of-life researchers in Barcelona, Spain. Life, it now appears, did not dawdle at the starting gate, but rushed forth at full gallop. UCLA paleobiologist J. William Schopf reported finding fossilized imprints of a thriving microbial community sandwiched between layers of rock that is 3.5 billion years old. This, along with other evidence, shows that life was well established only a billion years after the earth’s formation, a much faster evolution than previously thought. Life did not arise under calm, benign conditions, as once assumed, but
under the hellish skies of a planet racked by volcanic eruptions and menaced by comets and asteroids. In fact, the intruders from outer space may have delivered the raw materials necessary for life. So robust were the forces that gave rise to the first living organisms that it is entirely possible, many researchers believe, that life began not once but several times before it finally “took” and colonized the planet.
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Perhaps it was
Time
magazine’s “intruders from outer space” that provided the seed for Richard Dawkin’s believing that some intelligent visiting alien started life. Professor Dawkins said:
It could come about in the following way: it could be that, at some earlier time
somewhere in the universe a civilization evolved
by probably by some kind of Darwinian means to a very very high level of technology and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet…and that
designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe.
”
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He’s not alone with his celestial thoughts: “Chandra Wickramasinghe from Cardiff University, UK, has long argued the case for cometary panspermia, the idea that comets are infected with primitive life forms and delivered life to the early Earth. That would explain why life on Earth arose so quickly after our planet formed around 4.5 billion years ago.”
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So if comets are responsible for coming to this earth, carrying life forms, where did they come from? Who made them? Why were there life forms on the comets? For the answer, scientists go back to the original dreamer. He had the “conceptual might” to imagine a possible scenario:
It took the conceptual might of Charles Darwin to imagine a biologically plausible scenario for life’s emergence. In an oft quoted letter, written in 1871, Darwin suggested
that life arose in a “warm little pond” where a rich brew of organic chemicals, over eons of time, might have given rise to the first simple organisms. For the next century, Darwin’s agreeable hypothesis, expanded upon by other theorists, dominated thinking on the subject. Researchers decided that the “pond” was really the ocean and began trying to figure out where the building blocks of life could have come from.”
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But Darwin’s “warm little pond” opens a can of worms. Where did
it
come from, and why was there a “rich brew of organic chemicals” in the pond? It doesn’t answer where life came from at all. Besides, scientists now believe that his pond was actually an ocean, which just makes the problem of where it came from larger and deeper.
Darwin’s “warm little pond” opens a can of worms. Where did it come from, and why was there a “rich brew of organic chemicals” in the pond? It doesn’t answer where life came from at all.
Meanwhile, older and older fossils have all but proved that life did not evolve at the leisurely pace Darwin envisioned. Perhaps most intriguing of all, the discovery of organisms living in oceanic hot springs has provided a Stygian alternative to Darwin’s peaceful picture. Life, says microbiologist Karl Stetter of the University of Regensburg in Germany, may not have formed in a nice, warm pond, but in “a hot pressure cooker.”
If scientists have, by and large, tossed out the old ideas, they have not yet reached a consensus on the new. The current version of the story of life is a complex tale with many
solid facts, many holes and no shortage of competing theories on how to fill in the missing pieces.”
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In an article entitled “How Did Life Begin? New Research Suggests Meteorites May Have Helped,” Joel Kontinen writes:
Joel Kontinen Level: Platinum:
My background includes an MA in translation studies and a BA in Bible and Theology. I have written three novels in Finnish, my mother tongue.…
Since Charles Darwin’s day, theories about the birth of life have come and gone. Darwin famously speculated about life having begun in a warm pond. Researchers tested the idea in 2006 and found it wanting. They examined hot puddles in Kamchatka, Russia, and Mount Lassen in California and discovered that “hot acidic waters containing clay do not provide the right conditions for chemicals to assemble themselves into ‘pioneer organisms.’”
Stanley Miller and Harold Urey conducted a famous experiment in 1953. While it has been used as a propaganda device for evolution, Jonathan Wells and other Darwin skeptics have pointed out its flaws. Wells said: “The Miller-Urey experiment used a simulated atmosphere that geochemists now agree was incorrect, it was not the ‘first successful attempt to show how organic molecules might have been produced on the early Earth.’ When conditions are changed to reflect better knowledge of the Earth’s early atmosphere, the experiment doesn’t work.”
Others have looked to outer space as a potential source of life. Sir Fred Hoyle, convinced that life could not have originated on earth, suggested that it was brought here from space. While this panspermia view has its advocates, the naturalistic answer to how life began on Earth remains as elusive as ever.