Why Atheism is Anti-Science.
One of the most disingenuous arguments against the existence of God is the claim that Theism is a science-stopper in the sense that in ascribing something to God, one is putting an end to a scientific enquiry that will lead to a natural cause to whatever it is being explained.
I have already refuted this claim and other common Atheist objections here so will not repeat myself.
However I do think it is worth analysing Atheism in the same way and asking whether the assumptions made by non-believers are helpful or a hindrance to scientific progress.
Here follow a number of Atheist assumptions that if truly believed by
scientists would put an end to science as we know it.
The only reason that has not happened is that even the most ardent Atheist Scientist treats the universe as if it has been made by God, even as he or she denies such a possibility.
Atheism Science Stopper Belief 1:
The universe has been created by the blind, brute forces of matter and energy without any intelligent involvement
If scientists actually followed this belief in practice they would expect the universe to be disorderly and chaotic.
Instead scientists assume rational explanations will be found to all the enigmas of time and space.
We have every right to expect a rationally describable universe if it has been created by a rational agent i.e. God.
It is however totally irrational to expect rational laws to emerge from chance interactions of matter and energy.
Atheism Science Stopper Belief 2:
The human brain does not have free will. All our thoughts and actions are caused by chemical reactions in the brain
If this was really believed by any scientist he or she would also have to admit that all scientific facts that we know due to the brain of man are merely products of chemical events in the brain and have no necessary correlation to physical reality.
That being true, it would also be true that the brain itself may not exist and therefore may not be controlled by chemical reactions!
So we wind up at our starting point. Human reason only means something if has a relationship to the actual world.
Atheism does not have any claim to such a relationship.
However if a Rational creator created a rationally intelligible universe and bestowed reason upon human beings one would have an excellent basis for the worth of human reason, and therefore science, as well as free will and moral responsibility.
The distinguished Scientist J.B.S Haldane summarised the dilemma of the Atheist position brilliantly:
If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason for supposing that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically.
Here
In a nutshell: if God’s existence is not accepted then knowledge, including scientific knowledge, means nothing more than random chemical reactions.
Atheism Science Stopper Belief 3:
Induction is NOT a valid tool to understand physical reality. So if water is observed as boiling at a certain temperature and in certain conditions, we CANNOT conclude that similar conditions will always cause water to boil.
In the absence of God, we have no right to assume that laws of nature are regular and immutable.
For all we know similar conditions might cause a similar result 100,000 times, yet the same experiment might yield a different result the time after that!
The point being that in the absence of a force beyond matter causing matter and energy to interact in regular and repeating patterns there is no reason to ever expect the same experiment to produce the same results.
That, scientists do expect this shows that in reality they do treat the universe as if it is intentionally and Rationally Created and Intelligently Supervised.
Darwin’s Doubts and Alvin Platinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism
The eminent American philosopher and theologian Alvin Platinga has formulated a powerful argument against naturalism(which he defines as atheism +).
The argument is presented in a highly technical way, but to paraphrase (as best as I am able) it makes the following points:
It is worth stating that Darwin himself struggled with naturalism once confessing that he had a horrid doubt that if his intelligence was the product of chance, and not design, whether his thoughts had any more value than that of a monkey.
The question still haunts his supporters to this day.