You’ve articulated something many believers feel but rarely name: the imbalance in the conversation. Christians are constantly asked to defend every square inch of their worldview, while challengers often get to stand on unexamined assumptions. Your call to “flip the script” isn’t about scoring points — it’s about restoring honesty. If every worldview must account for reality, then every worldview must be willing to be examined.
Your own story illustrates the power of that examination. When you traced your inherited atheism back to its foundations, you found not a coherent structure but a series of unsupported leaps — intrinsic human value emerging from impersonal particles, moral conviction without a moral source, dignity without design. That crisis wasn’t a failure of reason; it was reason doing its job. And your move toward theism — and ultimately Christianity — shows how a worldview with God at the center actually explains the things that matter most.
I appreciate how you frame the Christian worldview as both comprehensive and coherent. It accounts for the universe’s intelligibility, the reality of consciousness, the weight of morality, the ache for meaning, and the dignity of every person. It doesn’t require special pleading or philosophical gymnastics. It simply fits the world we actually live in.
Your challenge to skeptics is gracious but necessary: if you want to question Christianity, you must also be willing to question the worldview you’re standing on. That’s not combativeness; that’s integrity. And as your examples show, many naturalistic alternatives collapse under the very realities their adherents care most about.
Thank you for writing with clarity, courage, and charity. This piece doesn’t just defend the faith — it invites deeper thinking, honest self‑examination, and conversations that actually move people toward truth.
Also just wanted to say how grateful I am for your newsletter. Your substack has really helped strengthen my faith and confidence in my beliefs as a young Christian! Thank you for the work you are doing, it is so so important! God bless!
This is good, but I would also point out that the same problem exists within populations that claim belief in God (political Christianity springs to mind). Although they say they believe, they make a mess of the Christian faith by the same means, which is a worldview built from meager underpinnings, clumsy patchwork, media influences and cultural preferences.
Many people are turned from the Christian faith by such people, and I would even argue there is a profitable industry that propagates these worldviews. These people, and their leaders, should be likewise confronted in a spirit of gentleness to justify what they believe and how they act.
"Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people. 4 For certain individuals whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality" (Jude 3-4a).
This is an excellent article. And I totally agree that often Christians in worldview discussions are put in defensive mode. I like your equal questions proposal. I would love to listen to you host such a discussion/debate with a well known atheist. My own background is engineering and I love apologetics.
Since one has to be a paid subscriber to comment on the Sunday article, I will suggest something here. Read/listen to Issac Asimov favorite short story. Asimov acclaimed he was an atheist but “The Last Question” says otherwise as Asimov failed to realize it proved there is a God.
Do you believe that Jesus really lived? I don't know that historical evidence is the same as the fact of the moon, but I do think we can say from a scientific perspective that it is more likely that He existed than that that He did not. Is that a good example of truth that we should hold to lightly in your opinion?
I was triggered by one of my favourite words - multiverse. I'm a devout Christian and a sci-fi lover and some folks have wondered how those two things can coexist. I once explained to a slightly bewildered friend that, as God is omniscient and knows all possible outcomes, that has to point to multiple universes. My God is omnipotent so this would not be a challenge. (I think I saw tiny birds tweeting around my friend's head. 😁)
You might want to rephrase this. Science is science whether it’s west, east, north, south, etc. it’s based on the four laws of nature and matter and energy. It’s pre-life but once life was introduced, all life was subject to these laws.
Now why our universe has these laws and their consequences and rules, is unknown except they obviously work for many things.
Science did essentially originate in Europe though technology in general was present in a lot of societies.
I've heard people complain about the use of the term 'Western Science'. But just as cultures vary, science varies.
At any rate, nature has no written rules, but she sure knows what's she's doing. Western science tries to create rules that accurately define what nature is doing, cause and effect. I have great respect for that. I taught that. But Western science still knows little about the 'why'.
You make an important point that Christian cultures were among the first to rely on the scientific method rather than mysticism to define nature.
I agree that physics is the backbone of all physical science. Math is essential to this science, but it is not the science, any more than the dictionary is lieterautre.
In all human religious debate concerning the existence of God we suffer from a nearly universal assumption. That assumption has to do with how our brains are wired, and the cognitive symbols we are forced to use when we communicate person to person.
In expressing our perception that there is order to the universe that is unexplainable by coincidence, we are trying to convey that order as being generated by a force or person because those are the obvious symbols we have that can exert an organized pattern on reality.
My argument has always been that there exist in this universe items, systems, and forces that human beings are not equipped to perceive or understand. We have no frame of reference, no symbols that would allow our understanding or organization of observations of things with which we are not equipped to deal.
The atheist, the naturalist, the materialist reduce the metaphorical symbols we are forced to use to attempt to communicate our ideas of God/Force/Order to literal images, which then serve as straw men, through which holes of absurdity are easily poked.
What we call God may not be a person, an individual conscious entity, or a force (as we understand forces) at all. Perhaps it's something more like a mathematical probability. Perhaps we're not equipped to know.
To experience something close to what I'm talking about, think about how you would explain the space shuttle to 1st century shepherds. Keep in mind that they have no words for rubber, plastic, aluminum, electricity, or vacuum. They don't understand the concepts of gravity or aerodynamics. You would have to substitute symbols familiar to them. Now consider how illogical and fantastical your story would seem to them if they took your symbolisms literally.
Reading through the comments, most of those commenting seem to be scientists. I am a mathematician, and approaching evolution from a mathematical standpoint, if there is no Creator God behind our universe then everything must occur according to the principles of probability. And probability never creates order. You have a better chance of winning the PowerBall for eight consecutive drawings than you do of shuffling a deck of 52 playing cards into one specific order. And that has a much, much greater chance of happening than the amino acids randomly putting themselves into the correct orders to create the 42 million amino acids present in a single cell. And then that impossible event has to happen, over and over and over, for every single cell in a single organism. And the way that probability works is that you take the probability of every single event that had to occur to get you to where you are today, and multiply them together to get the probability of the system. So if you have 100 events, and each has a 1 in 10 probability, then the probability of all of those occurring is 0.1^100, or 1^-100. The probability of 42 million amino acids forming just the way that they are needed in a single cell, solely by chance and not by design, is pretty much impossible. The evidence for our having a Creator is as overwhelming when you look at the microscopic as it is when you look at the cosmos. And so your offense could be to get the person who you are talking with to create a list of things that have to happen, assign "probabilities" to them (which is really hard to do with these things. What is the chance of an eye evolving? Or skin?), and then start to multiply that person's probabilities together. Perhaps they could see that the more things that you add into the mix, like the carbon cycle, the more difficult evolving would have been.
Essentially, it’s the number of distinct proteins in a cell that somehow must accumulate together in a single cell. This ranges from a thousand in a simple cell to 8 to 12 thousand proteins in human cells. Human cells are very different from each other and need 20 thousand plus proteins in total for all the cell types. The average protein contains 300-400 amino acids so the combination is extremely highly unlikely. And most are very different from each other so how they originated is a mystery either for the first cell or further iterations of cells.
"Probability never creates order" is wrong. Snowflakes, rock crystals, convection cells, hurricanes. Open thermodynamic systems with energy differentials produce local order all day long.
Your "42 million amino acids" conflates abiogenesis with evolution; the former is an unsolved problem, the mechanisms of the latter are reasonably well understood.
I don't want to just pound at this, but fundamentally you’re confusing “randomness” with “randomness plus natural selection”. Multiplying independent probabilities describes a one-shot lottery, not an iterated selection process with memory.
I do want to return to your comment about the eye evolving. It's a great example of evolution: we know of maybe 50 different eye designs. The underlying mechanism (photoreceptors, for example, are common to all), but the optical apparatus will be different (octopus eyes and human eyes are structurally different).
Given eye mechanisms differ, which makes more sense to you: A creator god used lots of different designs for unknown reasons, or evolution, because it includes random choices as part of the mechanism, ended up with a bunch of different solutions to the same problem?
My point is this, Keith. True evolution, with no creator, no designer, no mind behind it, cannot help but be random. Every single event is a roll of the dice, and there is no one to judge whether one outcome is better than another. The uncountable number of pages of meaningless combinations of characters and spaces are every bit as valid as the Shakespearean sonnet that finally, totally by accident, emerges from the typing monkey. And so every time that we see a process that has a tendency to it, such as atoms consistently organizing themselves into a group of specific amino acids when given the opportunity, and those amino acids organizing themselves into a group of specific proteins when given the opportunity, and we recognize that without these amino acids or these proteins life would not exist, we're now looking at loaded dice. There must be some part of the "programming," you might say, that encourages these specific kinds of connections instead of atoms simply joining up with whoever all might be available and fit any open atomic bond, like they're joining some orgy at a singles bar. And so while snowflakes may appear to us to be random, they are not. They follow very specific rules. And yet, within those rules, there is room for an enormous amount of variety.
“Every single event is a roll of the dice, and there is no one to judge whether one outcome is better than another.”
This leaves me confused, because I want to say it’s wrong.
There’s an obvious judge, which is whether or not the random change improves fitness. That happens when selection kicks in, which was arguably as soon as there was an imperfect replicator
It would help if you would clarify your focus: abiogenesis or evolution.
Keith, I unapologetically believe in a Creator who designed each and every variety of plant and animal on the earth. I don't think that abiogenesis or evolution are possible unless the Creator designed them specifically to happen. But I don't think He took that route. As for the arguments for evolution, is there any proof that Darwin's bird beaks were anything more than dominant and recessive genes? You can watch it happen over and over and over, depending on the current climate of the island, but has a new species arisen, with its own distinct DNA? And as for homologies, saying that certain bone characteristics are proof of common ancestry, is it really a scientific proof? I am currently building my fourth house. There are a lot of homologies between those four houses, but each of them was independently designed. But we are treated as if an unwillingness to accept someone telling us that these pictures are "proof" that evolution actually happened means that we are denying science. But homologies are an extremely weak case. But genetically, lets say that one person (and not some single-celled organism) had some random genetic change that improved their fitness, as you said. Does the DNA in every single cell of their body instantaneously change? Or is this a change that gets shared slowly throughout their body? And does that change ever make it to their reproductive cells? From everything that I have read, those changes don't get passed on in male reproductive cells, and for every single female mammal in the world, she is born with all of her eggs intact. No real chance for any female mammal to contribute to evolution. But lets say that someone did have a change in their DNA that made them more fit. There is only a 50% chance of that change being passed on to the next generation. Roughly a 25% chance of making it 2 generations. And roughly half again as much for each generation after that. And then did that DNA change end up being dominant or recessive? That's not really a way for an improvement to spread like wildfire. I am sharing these things not as an argument with you, but rather so that you can understand where I am coming from, where my thinking trends. You may read them and simply decide that I'm a lost cause. I have no problem with that. But I look at the world around me and ask, if evolution were true, how did the carbon cycle work before there were animals around, when there were only plants? I keep honeybees, and I ask, if evolution were true, then what would have made plants, at some point, change in order to create the symbiotic relationship with pollinators? And simply saying "They co-evolved," as I've heard people say, is no real answer, it's simply a smokescreen. The only answer that seems to truly answer that question is "They were both designed that way." I know all of that didn't really answer your question, but hopefully it may help you to understand a bit better where I am coming from.
I understand the point of view, and it’s the implications that are hard for me to hold.
Why is god such a terrible engineer? The design is simply bad from start to finish. This isn’t a couple of hundred years ago when we thought eyes were unique and well designed.
Why did god take billions of years and create billions of species only for them to go extinct when he threw it all away and designed humans? Why hundreds of millions of years on dinosaurs alone?
Why did god make such effort to hide the fact that he designed it? The DNA story is explicit and clear, evolution happened. If it’s designed, why would god take such effort to conceal his handiwork? To disbelieve in evolution is an outlying position to say the least: is Trickster God deliberately laying out false clues to send the scientists in the wrong direction?
There are people who believe that God already knows everything that could ever possibly be known ever. I am not one of those people. For those people, God already knows the best possible way to create each and every thing that He will ever create for all eternity. And so the actual "creating," if those people are right, basically comes down to God painting by numbers. To me, that's really no way to be creative. It's like if John Lennon and Paul McCartney already knew how every single song that they would write together would come out before they ever started writing. But, Keith, God is a CREATOR! And we, we are told, have been made in His image. And I believe that there is nothing heretical in thinking about God as Creator in light of how we ourselves create, since we are made in His image. And creating, going places that we have never been before, is often a messy thing. Think of Edison and his quest to make a light bulb. Not every single thing that we come up with is a "keeper" of an idea. But we can learn from both our successes and our failures as to what works and what doesn't, or what might just work better.
Paul told the Ephesians that God, before He even began any actual work on our universe, wanted to make creatures that He would adopt as His own children. That is the background to everything that happened since. And so He would have to figure out how to make a world with a stable atmosphere and temperature. How to create the simplest of creatures so that they could self-replicate. And then on to circulatory, nervous, and all of the other systems needed for larger creatures. And on and on, plants, animals, their interactions and interdependencies, a whole balanced ecosystem. And then I think that He was happy enough with where His creations had come to that He decided that it was time to start working on the creatures that He was going to adopt as His own children. And they would be creative, just as He is. And, because I don't that He knew, before He started all of this, just what these little creators would be like, that He was figuring it out as He went, I think that He realized at some point that dinosaurs and other creatures could be a danger to their survival. And so He did what was needed. Not because He didn't care about them. Jesus told us that God is fully aware of the plight of every sparrow on the earth. No, I think that their extinction was simply to give us a chance to thrive.
But even then there was still a lot of design work to do. Lucy and all of the other pre-Homo sapiens? I think that they were prototypes, created by God to work out the fine details of our dexterity, our ability to reason and interact with the world around us in ways that far surpassed every other creature that God had created. And when He finally worked everything out so that it worked and He was happy with it, He created man. The difference with man, though, is our ability to create, just as God does.
And to what purpose are we here for? God, who wants to adopt us, is a Creator. He always will be. I don't think that He's done creating. And I think that He wants His adopted kids to get involved in His creation. I don't know if you have kids of your own, but they have incredible imaginations. And so perhaps the plan is to, on all of the other habitable planets in the universe, to give each of these planets a distinct ecosystem. With His kids saying things like, "Maybe You could make something like a fish, but that sails through the air without wings!" And then He can take that idea and make it into a fully formed reality, fitting perfectly into its own world's ecosystem. Or maybe, if someone like you is there, you might say to God, "You know, I think that you could design that eye a lot more efficiently. What do You think about trying ____ instead?" That, in my mind, is where all of this is heading. And who knows, maybe God will create a completely separate universe whose fabric is not made of atoms, but rather something completely different that He's been thinking about, but just hasn't started working on yet.
There are a lot of people out there who will say that I'm way off base in all of this. Maybe I am. Maybe I'm not. But I hope that this may have, in some way, helped you.
OK, one more and I'll shut up, you don't like lots of comments from one person, lesson learned.
You say: "Without some kind of cosmic Law-giver, there’s no good reason to assume evolution would wire human brains to perceive reality accurately."
I'll get to human brains and accuracy in a minute, but first: are you arguing that organisms that more accurately perceive their environment are NOT more likely to reproduce, so evolution would not strongly favor increasing brain accuracy?
Eyesight is the obvious example, and there are an awful lot of independently evolved eyes, from proto eyes to complex eyes, and they all work differently, and you're saying that's all the cosmic Law-giver parceling out the ability to perceive reality accurately, and not evolution in action?
That's some fine-tuning. Think about the human eye and the blind spot. Other animals have better eyes, without a blind spot. But the cosmic Law-giver decided we didn't need to perceive that little chunk of reality accurately.
Now let's get to accuracy. You say:
"So if nature routinely selects for belief in things that (according to the naturalist) do not exist, and if that belief is itself tied to reproductive success, then on what basis can we trust our senses, our perceptions, or our capacity to reason about anything at all?"
Well... the correct answer is "we can't".
Trust our senses? Emphatically no, see "color constancy" "change blindness", "phantom limbs".
Trust our perceptions? No again: we edit our eye sight to fill in the blind spot, we rewrite/reorder our event timelines after perception, we rewrite the base memory every single time we remember something.
Trust our capacity to reason? Even more emphatically no. One of my favorite Wikipedia pages is the one on common cognitive biases. Read that and it will make you wonder how you manage to find coffee in the morning, given just how bad human reasoning is.
Consider the identifiable victim effect. It's why charity advertisements always show a single person or at most a few people. Reason should obviously conclude that helping 100 people is better than helping 1 person. But donations to a single named child are always higher than donations to millions of children, because that's how human reason works.
Psychologists have found that religiosity is moderately heritable, particularly in adulthood.
Behavioral genetics research, mainly twin and adoption studies, consistently shows this to be true.
Heritability is around 0–20% in adolescence. Shared environment like family upbringing, and parental religious practices accounts for most of the similarity between siblings.
Heritability in adulthood rises substantially, typically to 30–60%. The remaining variance comes from unique, non-shared environmental influences and measurement error. Shared family environment becomes much weaker than in adolescence.
This increase with age is a well replicated finding. As people leave home and gain more autonomy, genetic predispositions play a larger role in how religious they remain or become.
The intensity or strength of religious belief, the importance of religion in one’s life, and frequency of religious practices show clearer genetic influence.
Specific religious affiliation (e.g., being Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, etc.) is largely cultural and environmental, and shows little heritability.
There is no single “God gene.” Like most complex behavioral traits, religiosity is polygenic and overlaps genetically with personality dimensions, especially openness to experience, conscientiousness, and aspects related to community integration or existential concerns.
The fact remains that religiosity is heritable, and as such it must have survival value. Of what value would belief in a non-existent God be?
> Of what value would belief in a non-existent God be?
Look up "adaptive misbelief", or "positive illusion".
If a group believing in a non-existent god adds to group cohesiveness, there's value. Basically, if believing X has asymmetric costs/benefits, you may believe X even if it's false, as long as the benefits are sufficient.
Examples other than religion:
Everyone overestimates their abilities: statistically false but increases risk taking.
Romantic love: believing our partner is the irreplaceable "one for me" is statistically false but strengthens pair bonding.
Belief in a just world: statistically false but deters free riding.
Our host strongly argues religion is historically the fundamental glue that holds society together. There's considerable evidence she's correct, and that religious belief carries societal value. That said, given the 30-40 major historic faith groups, it probably doesn't matter what religion you pick, they function in similar ways in the society.
Utility and veracity are two different things. Most scientific models are only moderately useful and partly true—simplifying assumptions cannot account for all details, but enable practical application. But there is an underlying truth our models seek coherence to. As far as religion goes, I suspect a similar imperfect correspondence to reality, with some coming closer to the mark than others. So what you choose does matter.
Utility is not the measure of veracity. Some facts have no survival value. OTOH the question of belief is not whether it benefits you, it’s what is truly “good.” If that weren’t the case, we’d be right to pursue some historical practices that are now widely recognized as abhorrent.
Skepticism only takes you so far—at some point you have to assume/assert something as fundamental or you have no basis for choice other than irrational whimsy.
I would say our individual capacity is less than our shared capacity; I make an argument in the hope others will extend it where it makes sense and correct me where it doesn’t.
I think your mistake is take human reason as an all or nothing issue. I agree that we cannot trust our reason completely, for all the points you make. But you also most admit that we do have some ability to use reason, otherwise where is science, logic, philosophy, language and most of human culture. So the question becomes when reason fails us (as it often does, in even more ways than you cite) what do we do? My answer, (and that of most Christians I would expect) is to put our trust in a Being whose definition includes a perfect ability to see the truth in every aspect of our universe and ourselves, as the Creator of all reality. We do not deny the truth of those aspects of our own reason that allow us to see things clearly. This is especially true for scientists of Christian faith, like Sarah, and myself, and multiple others. But even when we study the scientific description of the universe or life, we find blocks where our reason fails us. And that's when we turn to God.
Humility, hope, and faith. Humility about our own capacity for self deception. Hope that we can stumble forward toward truth despite that, because, as science shows, collectively we can correct for each other’s individual errors. Faith that there is a truth to be known and a rational path towards it. Faith that reason is not just a human mental construct, but a model of an underlying reality we can grasp, if only haphazardly.
What Schaeffer meant and what the Quakers mean seem to offer a fascinating contrast. Schaeffer believed very strongly in the Truth with a capital T, regardless of our perception of truth. It sounds like the Quakers you reference believe in something a little more ambiguous. Am I understanding their saying correctly?
The idea the Quakers are trying to express with “Hold your truth lightly” is the idea that you may think you have The Truth there in your hand, but it’s more likely YOUR version of it, so be prepared to abandon it if and when you realize it’s not The Singular Objective Truth.
So what constitutes "your truth" and what constitutes "The Singular Objective Truth"?
What can we know for certain?
On one hand, I'm assuming we both believe that there really is a moon. On the other hand, we don't really know how exactly the moon came to be. Are those good examples for the two extremes?
“Your truth” is what you believe you know now. Hold it lightly. The ultimate truth may be different. We once thought that the sun revolved around the earth, and that the earth was flat. That was “your truth” in the Dark Ages.
"Who created God then, if everything that begins to exist has a cause?"
"God didn't begin to exist, he's always been there."
"And you have proof of that?"
"No."
"Then let's just say 'the Universe has always existed', that's simpler than inventing god."
"The universe had a beginning, the Big Bang."
"An always existing universe is compatible with some versions of the multiverse."
"Uncaused things aren't reasonable. Nobody lives their life that way. Give me one example of something popping into existence."
"Give me a few examples of immortal, omniscient, omnipresent beings creating universes. Your problem is that I have exactly as many examples of uncaused things as you have of immortal beings: zero."
"My personal God! He's the one exception!"
"And you have proof of that?"
Besides, even if you agree to Kalam for the purposes of the argument, it has no connection at all to any of the umpty-thousand deities humankind has invented. There's nothing at all to get you from Kalam to Jesus, or Zeus, or any of our deities.
Historical funny: Kalam was developed by medieval Muslim theologians to defend the Islamic creation story against the Greeks. AFAIK, Christians (including Maimonides and Aquinas) generally rejected Kalam. It wasn't until the late 1900s William Lane Craig resurrected it for Christianity.
A few things: there is zero conflict between science and religion - science emerged from the same intellectual source that taught religion - the medieval Christian university and before that the monastery system.
I personally have never been challenged on my religious beliefs so don’t relate. I have found most in the Church are not interested in the basis for their faith because they assume they will lose the argument.
My Substack (on truth) has an essay on how Christianity has the much stronger argument for truth than atheism. In fact atheists have no argument at all.
The multiverse argument loses immediately when you ask what is generating all these universes. The atheist has no answer.
Natural selection works within humans so belief in God must be a survival factor since most have believed it since the beginning. Does anyone not believe that all the internal strife going on now is based on hostility towards Christianity.
The article provides lots of other reasons to embrace Christianity that will lead to a stable society. Can anyone point to more good emerging from any other source? All they do is point to every transgression as a reason to object but can never identify a better system.
You’ve articulated something many believers feel but rarely name: the imbalance in the conversation. Christians are constantly asked to defend every square inch of their worldview, while challengers often get to stand on unexamined assumptions. Your call to “flip the script” isn’t about scoring points — it’s about restoring honesty. If every worldview must account for reality, then every worldview must be willing to be examined.
Your own story illustrates the power of that examination. When you traced your inherited atheism back to its foundations, you found not a coherent structure but a series of unsupported leaps — intrinsic human value emerging from impersonal particles, moral conviction without a moral source, dignity without design. That crisis wasn’t a failure of reason; it was reason doing its job. And your move toward theism — and ultimately Christianity — shows how a worldview with God at the center actually explains the things that matter most.
I appreciate how you frame the Christian worldview as both comprehensive and coherent. It accounts for the universe’s intelligibility, the reality of consciousness, the weight of morality, the ache for meaning, and the dignity of every person. It doesn’t require special pleading or philosophical gymnastics. It simply fits the world we actually live in.
Your challenge to skeptics is gracious but necessary: if you want to question Christianity, you must also be willing to question the worldview you’re standing on. That’s not combativeness; that’s integrity. And as your examples show, many naturalistic alternatives collapse under the very realities their adherents care most about.
Thank you for writing with clarity, courage, and charity. This piece doesn’t just defend the faith — it invites deeper thinking, honest self‑examination, and conversations that actually move people toward truth.
This is so helpful!
Also just wanted to say how grateful I am for your newsletter. Your substack has really helped strengthen my faith and confidence in my beliefs as a young Christian! Thank you for the work you are doing, it is so so important! God bless!
This is good, but I would also point out that the same problem exists within populations that claim belief in God (political Christianity springs to mind). Although they say they believe, they make a mess of the Christian faith by the same means, which is a worldview built from meager underpinnings, clumsy patchwork, media influences and cultural preferences.
Many people are turned from the Christian faith by such people, and I would even argue there is a profitable industry that propagates these worldviews. These people, and their leaders, should be likewise confronted in a spirit of gentleness to justify what they believe and how they act.
"Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people. 4 For certain individuals whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality" (Jude 3-4a).
This is an excellent article. And I totally agree that often Christians in worldview discussions are put in defensive mode. I like your equal questions proposal. I would love to listen to you host such a discussion/debate with a well known atheist. My own background is engineering and I love apologetics.
This is the approach of Greg Kokhl in his book Tactics and Street Smarts.
Its asking questions to get people to explain their positions.
Since one has to be a paid subscriber to comment on the Sunday article, I will suggest something here. Read/listen to Issac Asimov favorite short story. Asimov acclaimed he was an atheist but “The Last Question” says otherwise as Asimov failed to realize it proved there is a God.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z46PJbzWOoI
Do you believe that Jesus really lived? I don't know that historical evidence is the same as the fact of the moon, but I do think we can say from a scientific perspective that it is more likely that He existed than that that He did not. Is that a good example of truth that we should hold to lightly in your opinion?
I was triggered by one of my favourite words - multiverse. I'm a devout Christian and a sci-fi lover and some folks have wondered how those two things can coexist. I once explained to a slightly bewildered friend that, as God is omniscient and knows all possible outcomes, that has to point to multiple universes. My God is omnipotent so this would not be a challenge. (I think I saw tiny birds tweeting around my friend's head. 😁)
Amen. I remember when Nabeel Qureshi stated that the script was flipped on him, eventually leading him to Christ.
Western science excels at explaining the what, but remains essentially clueless about the why.
You might want to rephrase this. Science is science whether it’s west, east, north, south, etc. it’s based on the four laws of nature and matter and energy. It’s pre-life but once life was introduced, all life was subject to these laws.
Now why our universe has these laws and their consequences and rules, is unknown except they obviously work for many things.
Science did essentially originate in Europe though technology in general was present in a lot of societies.
I've heard people complain about the use of the term 'Western Science'. But just as cultures vary, science varies.
At any rate, nature has no written rules, but she sure knows what's she's doing. Western science tries to create rules that accurately define what nature is doing, cause and effect. I have great respect for that. I taught that. But Western science still knows little about the 'why'.
I’ve written about this in two essays:
https://jrcsmc.substack.com/p/the-most-significant-event-in-history
And
https://jrcsmc.substack.com/p/science
Both are works in progress so feel free to comment if you read them.
I like what you've written in both these essays.
You make an important point that Christian cultures were among the first to rely on the scientific method rather than mysticism to define nature.
I agree that physics is the backbone of all physical science. Math is essential to this science, but it is not the science, any more than the dictionary is lieterautre.
Thank you!
I like your analogy on the relationship of the dictionary to literature so I might use it.
Feel free.
In all human religious debate concerning the existence of God we suffer from a nearly universal assumption. That assumption has to do with how our brains are wired, and the cognitive symbols we are forced to use when we communicate person to person.
In expressing our perception that there is order to the universe that is unexplainable by coincidence, we are trying to convey that order as being generated by a force or person because those are the obvious symbols we have that can exert an organized pattern on reality.
My argument has always been that there exist in this universe items, systems, and forces that human beings are not equipped to perceive or understand. We have no frame of reference, no symbols that would allow our understanding or organization of observations of things with which we are not equipped to deal.
The atheist, the naturalist, the materialist reduce the metaphorical symbols we are forced to use to attempt to communicate our ideas of God/Force/Order to literal images, which then serve as straw men, through which holes of absurdity are easily poked.
What we call God may not be a person, an individual conscious entity, or a force (as we understand forces) at all. Perhaps it's something more like a mathematical probability. Perhaps we're not equipped to know.
To experience something close to what I'm talking about, think about how you would explain the space shuttle to 1st century shepherds. Keep in mind that they have no words for rubber, plastic, aluminum, electricity, or vacuum. They don't understand the concepts of gravity or aerodynamics. You would have to substitute symbols familiar to them. Now consider how illogical and fantastical your story would seem to them if they took your symbolisms literally.
Reading through the comments, most of those commenting seem to be scientists. I am a mathematician, and approaching evolution from a mathematical standpoint, if there is no Creator God behind our universe then everything must occur according to the principles of probability. And probability never creates order. You have a better chance of winning the PowerBall for eight consecutive drawings than you do of shuffling a deck of 52 playing cards into one specific order. And that has a much, much greater chance of happening than the amino acids randomly putting themselves into the correct orders to create the 42 million amino acids present in a single cell. And then that impossible event has to happen, over and over and over, for every single cell in a single organism. And the way that probability works is that you take the probability of every single event that had to occur to get you to where you are today, and multiply them together to get the probability of the system. So if you have 100 events, and each has a 1 in 10 probability, then the probability of all of those occurring is 0.1^100, or 1^-100. The probability of 42 million amino acids forming just the way that they are needed in a single cell, solely by chance and not by design, is pretty much impossible. The evidence for our having a Creator is as overwhelming when you look at the microscopic as it is when you look at the cosmos. And so your offense could be to get the person who you are talking with to create a list of things that have to happen, assign "probabilities" to them (which is really hard to do with these things. What is the chance of an eye evolving? Or skin?), and then start to multiply that person's probabilities together. Perhaps they could see that the more things that you add into the mix, like the carbon cycle, the more difficult evolving would have been.
Essentially, it’s the number of distinct proteins in a cell that somehow must accumulate together in a single cell. This ranges from a thousand in a simple cell to 8 to 12 thousand proteins in human cells. Human cells are very different from each other and need 20 thousand plus proteins in total for all the cell types. The average protein contains 300-400 amino acids so the combination is extremely highly unlikely. And most are very different from each other so how they originated is a mystery either for the first cell or further iterations of cells.
"Probability never creates order" is wrong. Snowflakes, rock crystals, convection cells, hurricanes. Open thermodynamic systems with energy differentials produce local order all day long.
Your "42 million amino acids" conflates abiogenesis with evolution; the former is an unsolved problem, the mechanisms of the latter are reasonably well understood.
I don't want to just pound at this, but fundamentally you’re confusing “randomness” with “randomness plus natural selection”. Multiplying independent probabilities describes a one-shot lottery, not an iterated selection process with memory.
I do want to return to your comment about the eye evolving. It's a great example of evolution: we know of maybe 50 different eye designs. The underlying mechanism (photoreceptors, for example, are common to all), but the optical apparatus will be different (octopus eyes and human eyes are structurally different).
Given eye mechanisms differ, which makes more sense to you: A creator god used lots of different designs for unknown reasons, or evolution, because it includes random choices as part of the mechanism, ended up with a bunch of different solutions to the same problem?
My point is this, Keith. True evolution, with no creator, no designer, no mind behind it, cannot help but be random. Every single event is a roll of the dice, and there is no one to judge whether one outcome is better than another. The uncountable number of pages of meaningless combinations of characters and spaces are every bit as valid as the Shakespearean sonnet that finally, totally by accident, emerges from the typing monkey. And so every time that we see a process that has a tendency to it, such as atoms consistently organizing themselves into a group of specific amino acids when given the opportunity, and those amino acids organizing themselves into a group of specific proteins when given the opportunity, and we recognize that without these amino acids or these proteins life would not exist, we're now looking at loaded dice. There must be some part of the "programming," you might say, that encourages these specific kinds of connections instead of atoms simply joining up with whoever all might be available and fit any open atomic bond, like they're joining some orgy at a singles bar. And so while snowflakes may appear to us to be random, they are not. They follow very specific rules. And yet, within those rules, there is room for an enormous amount of variety.
“Every single event is a roll of the dice, and there is no one to judge whether one outcome is better than another.”
This leaves me confused, because I want to say it’s wrong.
There’s an obvious judge, which is whether or not the random change improves fitness. That happens when selection kicks in, which was arguably as soon as there was an imperfect replicator
It would help if you would clarify your focus: abiogenesis or evolution.
Keith, I unapologetically believe in a Creator who designed each and every variety of plant and animal on the earth. I don't think that abiogenesis or evolution are possible unless the Creator designed them specifically to happen. But I don't think He took that route. As for the arguments for evolution, is there any proof that Darwin's bird beaks were anything more than dominant and recessive genes? You can watch it happen over and over and over, depending on the current climate of the island, but has a new species arisen, with its own distinct DNA? And as for homologies, saying that certain bone characteristics are proof of common ancestry, is it really a scientific proof? I am currently building my fourth house. There are a lot of homologies between those four houses, but each of them was independently designed. But we are treated as if an unwillingness to accept someone telling us that these pictures are "proof" that evolution actually happened means that we are denying science. But homologies are an extremely weak case. But genetically, lets say that one person (and not some single-celled organism) had some random genetic change that improved their fitness, as you said. Does the DNA in every single cell of their body instantaneously change? Or is this a change that gets shared slowly throughout their body? And does that change ever make it to their reproductive cells? From everything that I have read, those changes don't get passed on in male reproductive cells, and for every single female mammal in the world, she is born with all of her eggs intact. No real chance for any female mammal to contribute to evolution. But lets say that someone did have a change in their DNA that made them more fit. There is only a 50% chance of that change being passed on to the next generation. Roughly a 25% chance of making it 2 generations. And roughly half again as much for each generation after that. And then did that DNA change end up being dominant or recessive? That's not really a way for an improvement to spread like wildfire. I am sharing these things not as an argument with you, but rather so that you can understand where I am coming from, where my thinking trends. You may read them and simply decide that I'm a lost cause. I have no problem with that. But I look at the world around me and ask, if evolution were true, how did the carbon cycle work before there were animals around, when there were only plants? I keep honeybees, and I ask, if evolution were true, then what would have made plants, at some point, change in order to create the symbiotic relationship with pollinators? And simply saying "They co-evolved," as I've heard people say, is no real answer, it's simply a smokescreen. The only answer that seems to truly answer that question is "They were both designed that way." I know all of that didn't really answer your question, but hopefully it may help you to understand a bit better where I am coming from.
I understand the point of view, and it’s the implications that are hard for me to hold.
Why is god such a terrible engineer? The design is simply bad from start to finish. This isn’t a couple of hundred years ago when we thought eyes were unique and well designed.
Why did god take billions of years and create billions of species only for them to go extinct when he threw it all away and designed humans? Why hundreds of millions of years on dinosaurs alone?
Why did god make such effort to hide the fact that he designed it? The DNA story is explicit and clear, evolution happened. If it’s designed, why would god take such effort to conceal his handiwork? To disbelieve in evolution is an outlying position to say the least: is Trickster God deliberately laying out false clues to send the scientists in the wrong direction?
There are people who believe that God already knows everything that could ever possibly be known ever. I am not one of those people. For those people, God already knows the best possible way to create each and every thing that He will ever create for all eternity. And so the actual "creating," if those people are right, basically comes down to God painting by numbers. To me, that's really no way to be creative. It's like if John Lennon and Paul McCartney already knew how every single song that they would write together would come out before they ever started writing. But, Keith, God is a CREATOR! And we, we are told, have been made in His image. And I believe that there is nothing heretical in thinking about God as Creator in light of how we ourselves create, since we are made in His image. And creating, going places that we have never been before, is often a messy thing. Think of Edison and his quest to make a light bulb. Not every single thing that we come up with is a "keeper" of an idea. But we can learn from both our successes and our failures as to what works and what doesn't, or what might just work better.
Paul told the Ephesians that God, before He even began any actual work on our universe, wanted to make creatures that He would adopt as His own children. That is the background to everything that happened since. And so He would have to figure out how to make a world with a stable atmosphere and temperature. How to create the simplest of creatures so that they could self-replicate. And then on to circulatory, nervous, and all of the other systems needed for larger creatures. And on and on, plants, animals, their interactions and interdependencies, a whole balanced ecosystem. And then I think that He was happy enough with where His creations had come to that He decided that it was time to start working on the creatures that He was going to adopt as His own children. And they would be creative, just as He is. And, because I don't that He knew, before He started all of this, just what these little creators would be like, that He was figuring it out as He went, I think that He realized at some point that dinosaurs and other creatures could be a danger to their survival. And so He did what was needed. Not because He didn't care about them. Jesus told us that God is fully aware of the plight of every sparrow on the earth. No, I think that their extinction was simply to give us a chance to thrive.
But even then there was still a lot of design work to do. Lucy and all of the other pre-Homo sapiens? I think that they were prototypes, created by God to work out the fine details of our dexterity, our ability to reason and interact with the world around us in ways that far surpassed every other creature that God had created. And when He finally worked everything out so that it worked and He was happy with it, He created man. The difference with man, though, is our ability to create, just as God does.
And to what purpose are we here for? God, who wants to adopt us, is a Creator. He always will be. I don't think that He's done creating. And I think that He wants His adopted kids to get involved in His creation. I don't know if you have kids of your own, but they have incredible imaginations. And so perhaps the plan is to, on all of the other habitable planets in the universe, to give each of these planets a distinct ecosystem. With His kids saying things like, "Maybe You could make something like a fish, but that sails through the air without wings!" And then He can take that idea and make it into a fully formed reality, fitting perfectly into its own world's ecosystem. Or maybe, if someone like you is there, you might say to God, "You know, I think that you could design that eye a lot more efficiently. What do You think about trying ____ instead?" That, in my mind, is where all of this is heading. And who knows, maybe God will create a completely separate universe whose fabric is not made of atoms, but rather something completely different that He's been thinking about, but just hasn't started working on yet.
There are a lot of people out there who will say that I'm way off base in all of this. Maybe I am. Maybe I'm not. But I hope that this may have, in some way, helped you.
OK, one more and I'll shut up, you don't like lots of comments from one person, lesson learned.
You say: "Without some kind of cosmic Law-giver, there’s no good reason to assume evolution would wire human brains to perceive reality accurately."
I'll get to human brains and accuracy in a minute, but first: are you arguing that organisms that more accurately perceive their environment are NOT more likely to reproduce, so evolution would not strongly favor increasing brain accuracy?
Eyesight is the obvious example, and there are an awful lot of independently evolved eyes, from proto eyes to complex eyes, and they all work differently, and you're saying that's all the cosmic Law-giver parceling out the ability to perceive reality accurately, and not evolution in action?
That's some fine-tuning. Think about the human eye and the blind spot. Other animals have better eyes, without a blind spot. But the cosmic Law-giver decided we didn't need to perceive that little chunk of reality accurately.
Now let's get to accuracy. You say:
"So if nature routinely selects for belief in things that (according to the naturalist) do not exist, and if that belief is itself tied to reproductive success, then on what basis can we trust our senses, our perceptions, or our capacity to reason about anything at all?"
Well... the correct answer is "we can't".
Trust our senses? Emphatically no, see "color constancy" "change blindness", "phantom limbs".
Trust our perceptions? No again: we edit our eye sight to fill in the blind spot, we rewrite/reorder our event timelines after perception, we rewrite the base memory every single time we remember something.
Trust our capacity to reason? Even more emphatically no. One of my favorite Wikipedia pages is the one on common cognitive biases. Read that and it will make you wonder how you manage to find coffee in the morning, given just how bad human reasoning is.
Consider the identifiable victim effect. It's why charity advertisements always show a single person or at most a few people. Reason should obviously conclude that helping 100 people is better than helping 1 person. But donations to a single named child are always higher than donations to millions of children, because that's how human reason works.
Trust our capacity to reason?
I think not.
Psychologists have found that religiosity is moderately heritable, particularly in adulthood.
Behavioral genetics research, mainly twin and adoption studies, consistently shows this to be true.
Heritability is around 0–20% in adolescence. Shared environment like family upbringing, and parental religious practices accounts for most of the similarity between siblings.
Heritability in adulthood rises substantially, typically to 30–60%. The remaining variance comes from unique, non-shared environmental influences and measurement error. Shared family environment becomes much weaker than in adolescence.
This increase with age is a well replicated finding. As people leave home and gain more autonomy, genetic predispositions play a larger role in how religious they remain or become.
The intensity or strength of religious belief, the importance of religion in one’s life, and frequency of religious practices show clearer genetic influence.
Specific religious affiliation (e.g., being Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, etc.) is largely cultural and environmental, and shows little heritability.
There is no single “God gene.” Like most complex behavioral traits, religiosity is polygenic and overlaps genetically with personality dimensions, especially openness to experience, conscientiousness, and aspects related to community integration or existential concerns.
The fact remains that religiosity is heritable, and as such it must have survival value. Of what value would belief in a non-existent God be?
> Of what value would belief in a non-existent God be?
Look up "adaptive misbelief", or "positive illusion".
If a group believing in a non-existent god adds to group cohesiveness, there's value. Basically, if believing X has asymmetric costs/benefits, you may believe X even if it's false, as long as the benefits are sufficient.
Examples other than religion:
Everyone overestimates their abilities: statistically false but increases risk taking.
Romantic love: believing our partner is the irreplaceable "one for me" is statistically false but strengthens pair bonding.
Belief in a just world: statistically false but deters free riding.
Our host strongly argues religion is historically the fundamental glue that holds society together. There's considerable evidence she's correct, and that religious belief carries societal value. That said, given the 30-40 major historic faith groups, it probably doesn't matter what religion you pick, they function in similar ways in the society.
Utility and veracity are two different things. Most scientific models are only moderately useful and partly true—simplifying assumptions cannot account for all details, but enable practical application. But there is an underlying truth our models seek coherence to. As far as religion goes, I suspect a similar imperfect correspondence to reality, with some coming closer to the mark than others. So what you choose does matter.
Utility is not the measure of veracity. Some facts have no survival value. OTOH the question of belief is not whether it benefits you, it’s what is truly “good.” If that weren’t the case, we’d be right to pursue some historical practices that are now widely recognized as abhorrent.
Skepticism only takes you so far—at some point you have to assume/assert something as fundamental or you have no basis for choice other than irrational whimsy.
If there is so little reason to trust our capacity to reason, why are you bothering to make an argument at all?
I would say our individual capacity is less than our shared capacity; I make an argument in the hope others will extend it where it makes sense and correct me where it doesn’t.
And is there any other way to move forward?
I think your mistake is take human reason as an all or nothing issue. I agree that we cannot trust our reason completely, for all the points you make. But you also most admit that we do have some ability to use reason, otherwise where is science, logic, philosophy, language and most of human culture. So the question becomes when reason fails us (as it often does, in even more ways than you cite) what do we do? My answer, (and that of most Christians I would expect) is to put our trust in a Being whose definition includes a perfect ability to see the truth in every aspect of our universe and ourselves, as the Creator of all reality. We do not deny the truth of those aspects of our own reason that allow us to see things clearly. This is especially true for scientists of Christian faith, like Sarah, and myself, and multiple others. But even when we study the scientific description of the universe or life, we find blocks where our reason fails us. And that's when we turn to God.
Humility, hope, and faith. Humility about our own capacity for self deception. Hope that we can stumble forward toward truth despite that, because, as science shows, collectively we can correct for each other’s individual errors. Faith that there is a truth to be known and a rational path towards it. Faith that reason is not just a human mental construct, but a model of an underlying reality we can grasp, if only haphazardly.
I believe Francis Schaeffer used a similar "method," if you could call it that. He called it , "holding the truth in tension," or something like that.
Quakers say, "Hold your truth lightly."
What Schaeffer meant and what the Quakers mean seem to offer a fascinating contrast. Schaeffer believed very strongly in the Truth with a capital T, regardless of our perception of truth. It sounds like the Quakers you reference believe in something a little more ambiguous. Am I understanding their saying correctly?
The idea the Quakers are trying to express with “Hold your truth lightly” is the idea that you may think you have The Truth there in your hand, but it’s more likely YOUR version of it, so be prepared to abandon it if and when you realize it’s not The Singular Objective Truth.
So what constitutes "your truth" and what constitutes "The Singular Objective Truth"?
What can we know for certain?
On one hand, I'm assuming we both believe that there really is a moon. On the other hand, we don't really know how exactly the moon came to be. Are those good examples for the two extremes?
“Your truth” is what you believe you know now. Hold it lightly. The ultimate truth may be different. We once thought that the sun revolved around the earth, and that the earth was flat. That was “your truth” in the Dark Ages.
Do you believe anything for sure? Or is everything “your truth”?
I believe my wife exists. For sure. No doubts at all. It's not “my truth.” She is True. She is real.
Kalam creates more problems than it solves.
"Who created God then, if everything that begins to exist has a cause?"
"God didn't begin to exist, he's always been there."
"And you have proof of that?"
"No."
"Then let's just say 'the Universe has always existed', that's simpler than inventing god."
"The universe had a beginning, the Big Bang."
"An always existing universe is compatible with some versions of the multiverse."
"Uncaused things aren't reasonable. Nobody lives their life that way. Give me one example of something popping into existence."
"Give me a few examples of immortal, omniscient, omnipresent beings creating universes. Your problem is that I have exactly as many examples of uncaused things as you have of immortal beings: zero."
"My personal God! He's the one exception!"
"And you have proof of that?"
Besides, even if you agree to Kalam for the purposes of the argument, it has no connection at all to any of the umpty-thousand deities humankind has invented. There's nothing at all to get you from Kalam to Jesus, or Zeus, or any of our deities.
Historical funny: Kalam was developed by medieval Muslim theologians to defend the Islamic creation story against the Greeks. AFAIK, Christians (including Maimonides and Aquinas) generally rejected Kalam. It wasn't until the late 1900s William Lane Craig resurrected it for Christianity.
A few things: there is zero conflict between science and religion - science emerged from the same intellectual source that taught religion - the medieval Christian university and before that the monastery system.
I personally have never been challenged on my religious beliefs so don’t relate. I have found most in the Church are not interested in the basis for their faith because they assume they will lose the argument.
My Substack (on truth) has an essay on how Christianity has the much stronger argument for truth than atheism. In fact atheists have no argument at all.
The multiverse argument loses immediately when you ask what is generating all these universes. The atheist has no answer.
Natural selection works within humans so belief in God must be a survival factor since most have believed it since the beginning. Does anyone not believe that all the internal strife going on now is based on hostility towards Christianity.
The article provides lots of other reasons to embrace Christianity that will lead to a stable society. Can anyone point to more good emerging from any other source? All they do is point to every transgression as a reason to object but can never identify a better system.
When you ask what is generating all these universes, the atheist has a great answer: "I don't know."
Switching my answer to "The invisible dragon on my shoulder is creating all of the universes" doesn't make me more likely to be correct.