Patrick Prill - Things Atheists Say that Simply Make No Sense

FIDELIS PUBLISHING

ISBN: 978-1-7354285-0-5

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-7354285-3-6

Things Atheists Say

That simply make no sense

2021 Patrick Prill

All Rights Reserved

Cover Design by Patrick Prill

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

This publisher is not responsible for the departures chosen by this author from trade book publishing standards as set by The Chicago Manual of Style.

Fidelis Publishing, LLC Sterling, VA Nashville, TN fidelispublishing.com

Published in the United States of America

For my incredible children and their generation, with special thanks to Michael as my motivation and many thanks to Jennifer, Rebecca, Jim, Dan, Nate, Willow, Ed, Justin, Rick, Bryan and Michael for their many helpful comments and suggestions.

A theists are only human. That can be said of us all. None of us are perfect and we dont always get it right. And, even when we are right about something, we may not always express it in the most gracious manner. After all, were only human.

This book isnt about atheists. Its about some of the things they say. When you listen to what many well-known atheists are saying, it can be surprising. Its surprising because much of what they say actually makes no sense. In some cases, this is because its simply not true. In others, its based on wishful thinking, filled with logical fallacies, biased, or just very uninformed. However, something said even with intellectual or emotional resolve doesnt necessarily make it so.

This book is also not really about science, though science is included in the topics covered. It seems that theists, atheists and agnostics can all be great scientists. Yet even great scientists can get a few things wrong and its certain they dont always agree. Thats also true of great historians, philosophers, ethics professors and theologians.

No one is infallible. We can all make mistakes in logic, draw from sources that got the facts wrong and be blinded to truth by our own limited perspectives. So, we shouldnt belittle each other when we get it wrong. But, we should be able and willing to kindly challenge each others facts, reasoning and conclusions. Thats what this book seeks to do.

About 3.1 percent of Americans are atheists. Another 4 percent are agnostic and arent sure if God exists or not. That leaves about 93 percent of Americans who believe there is a God or a higher power. This book is for all of you.

As for those who are quoted in this bookshould I ever meet themI hope that, though disagreeing, I may not have been found to have misrepresented them or been unkind to them. It seems that in todays society we can either engage in civil discourse or civil war. I choose the former.

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But the discovery relatively recently of the extreme fine-tuning of so many of the laws of nature could lead at least some of us back to the old idea that this grand design is the work of some grand designer. That is not the answer of modern science.

Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

Stephen Hawking

T he late Stephen Hawking was a brilliant man. He was a physicist and cosmologist with a PhD from Cambridge. Most people know about him from his best-selling books, A Brief History of Time and The Grand Design and the movie about his life, The Theory of Everything. Stephen Hawking was very intelligent, but some of his ideas contradicted his intellect and exposed a huge bias.

Hawking observed that the laws of nature and the many incredibly fine-tuned variables, making life on earth possible, look as though they were designed. However, he dismissed even the possibility of a designer as being unscientific. Instead, he devised a theory not requiring a designer.

Hawking theorized that the universe spontaneously came into being from nothing because there is a law like gravity. In other words, the universe had to create itself from nothing because of the law of gravity. He then added, since the probability that a life-supporting universe like ours exists is so incredibly small, there must be an almost infinite number of spontaneously self-generated universes for even one like ours to exist.

This is some theory. There are a few obvious problems with it. The first is, it isnt actually based on science. George Ellis, another brilliant physicist, who co-authored The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with Stephen Hawking, states that Hawkings multiverse idea is unprovable and philosophical. He further states that, even if there were many universes, preexisting laws would be required to make them come into existence. There would have to be something that required universes to come into being. So, it seems Stephen Hawkings scientific theory for how the universe came to be isnt really scientific after allits philosophical.

He likens the multiverse ideas lack of substance in providing a reason for the universes existence to be like a mythical super-turtle holding up the world:

So the multiverse likewise retains an element of arbitrariness and absurdity. Its super-turtle also levitates for no reasons, so that theory too is ultimately absurd.

John Lennox, a mathematics professor at Oxford,

Lennox concludes, What all this goes to show is that nonsense is still nonsense, even when talked by world-famous scientists.

Stephen Hawking was correctthe universe does look designed. It looks so designed that Freeman Dyson, a Princeton University physicist, famously observed:

The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense knew we were coming.

Science points to a beginning of our universe. There was nothingno time, matter, energy, space or lawsthen there was everything. We call this the big bang. And, the everything that resulted is subject to precisely tuned laws enabling (and possibly compelling) life to exist.

Science cant prove what caused all this. However, it seems logical that the natural universe couldnt have created itself from nothing any more than we could have given birth to ourselves (before we existed) from nothing.

Hawking was inconsistent in his logic. He dismissed the possibility that our fine-tuned universe may have a designer, who exists outside of nature, as unscientific. Yet his own theory isnt based on scienceits a philosophical speculation. And, his idea of universes creating themselves out of nothing is fraught with logical problems. Even to many other physicists and mathematicians, this makes no sense.

The observed fact is that every species, and every organ that has ever been looked at within every species, is good at what it does.

We live on a planet where we are surrounded by perhaps ten million species, each one of which independently displays a powerful illusion of apparent design.