FRANK TUREK BOOK STEALING FROM GOD - DO SCIENCE AND GOD CONTRADICT
EACH OTHER?
Christian Frank Turek of https://impactapologetics.com/ is a prime defender of
the Christian faith. He wrote the runaway best seller Stealing from God. This
book claims that atheists are using arguments that belong to and with belief in
God to argue against God.
He makes comments in the book about science and God. He seeks to do away with
the fear that scientific methodology means rejecting God or ignoring God. If God
alone matters then when he is so important then ignoring him is just another way
of rejecting him.
Quote: [With regard to suffering and the way things are done etc] complaining
that God should have done it differently is a judgment for theology, not
science. He says, "The definition of science ... is a philosophical question."
Comment: He says in his book that science does philosophy without realising it
and as theology and philosophy are inseparable it follows that you cannot rule
out science having the right to judge. Science is about observation and testing
it. Something based on testing surely would have the biggest right to command
our belief and agreement! And that is what science is about. Despite himself
Turek agrees with us.
Notice how he says theology must decide if evil and suffering can happen in a
universe that comes from an all-good God. He is careful not to say ethics for
ethics is thinking of how best to reduce harm. If you use ethics not morality
and not religion then God is judged bad. It is that simple.
Science presupposes an ethic that says, "Don't harm truth. Discover it." It
clearly then says God needs to go if it harms truth.
Quote: Neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and his coauthor Denyse O’Leary observe
that, “placebos usually help a percentage of patients enrolled in the control
group of a study, perhaps 35 to 45 percent. Thus, in recent decades, if a drug’s
effect is statistically significant, which means that it is at least 5 percent
better than a placebo, it can be licensed for use.” In other words, in some
cases, merely thinking you are getting medicine is almost as good as actually
getting medicine. This makes no sense if materialism is true.
Comment: It makes perfect sense when a placebo is less effective than you'd
expect. The score is not very good and ignores the fact that if a person is
given a placebo and gets better that it still may have little or nothing to do
with the placebo.
Placebos are compatible with materialism for if thoughts are material powers
then good thoughts might help. Placebos are evidence for materialism.
The evidence is that despite the placebo having a good name, it is
over-emphasised and opens the door to charlatans.
The placebo is based on a lie and an error so unless you want to invoke it as
evidence of witchcraft style gods and spirits who are morally negligent then
don't invoke it.
The placebo is a huge thing more than we realise and we all use placebos every
day even if it is just a glass of water. It should be top evidence then for the
falsity of materialism if Turek's logic is followed.
Quote: [God is “Omnipotent: all-powerful; can do whatever is logically
possible]. Omnipresent”.
The two are linked. You are not really all-powerful if you cannot be everywhere.
All-powerful means you can be everywhere and indeed should be. People see that
as everything being made out of God or as good as. Such pantheism whether one is
aware of identifying God and everything else or not is harmful and amounts to
seeing evil as a blessing from God especially when you are not the one facing
the evil!
Christians deny being pantheists but if they are or most of them are then it
follows that science is theology if the universe is god or God or the body of
God.
Quote: Idols don’t really exist!
My comment: So to worship God if he is not real or any unreal god is to waste
worship. It is worshipping nothing. Christianity says that God is the one
realest thing so it follows that if he is worshipped and he is not real then
that is the worst idolatry of all. Worshipping Zeus is less risky!
Quote: If they say, “All truth changes,” ask them, “Does that truth change?” If
they say, “All truth depends on your perspective,” ask them, “Does that truth
depend on your perspective?” If they say, “You’re just playing word games with
me!” ask them “Is that a word game? Why is it that when I use logic, you say
it’s a word game, but when you use logic, you assume it’s gospel truth?” Logic
is not a word game. It’s very serious business. It’s the means by which we
understand everything about life.
Comment: Nobody sane thinks that if everybody starts to believe Queen Elizabeth
I does not exist then the new truth is that she didn't. Maybe Turek's opponents
are just noticing that we learn new truths all the time and describing it wrong.
It is not that truth is changing. It is that truth is being added to or updated.
Quote about Francis Crick who discovered DNA: If Crick is correct, we’re not
free creatures—we’re just molecular machines. We’re not really reasoning; we’re
merely reacting.
Comment: Computers can think! Reason is a reaction of a certain kind. The dog
may have no reason but it acts as if it knows not to jump into the fire.
Quote: No one created something out of nothing? To doubt the law of causality
is to doubt virtually everything we know about reality, including our ability to
reason and do science. All arguments, all thinking, all science, and all aspects
of life depend on the law of causality.
My comment: If no one created the universe out of nothing who cares? If
something did then something did. It doesn’t have to be someone!
Quote: There are good reasons for positing God. If space, time, and matter had a
beginning, then the cause must transcend space, time, and matter. In other
words, the cause must be spaceless, timeless, and immaterial. This cause also
must be enormously powerful to create the universe out of nothing. And it must
be a personal agent in order to choose to create, since an impersonal force has
no capacity to choose to create anything. Agents create. Impersonal forces,
which we call natural laws, merely govern what is already created, provided
agents don’t interfere. For example, gravity as an impersonal force can’t decide
anything. It blindly does the same thing over and over…
Comment: The cause does not need to transcend space and time and matter. A
different kind of space time and matter or energy can cause what we have. And an
impersonal force can choose in a sense. A person who is insane with drugs still
acts like there is enough of a faculty there to choose. But in reality there is
no choice but a mimic one. Not all choosing is choosing.
What can Turek do to refute the suggestion that our personalities and brains are
comprised of countless regularities that blindly do the same thing over and over
but we cannot notice for it is so complicated and works as if we are not blindly
doing things?
Quote: “Since nature had a beginning, nature can’t be its own cause. The cause
must be beyond nature, which is what we mean by the term ‘supernatural.’”
Remember that the supernatural can be anything or have any laws we can imagine
for we don't know exactly how it runs. We cannot test for its presence or its
laws. It need not give us a God or a force that does the miracles or magic we
want to attribute to it.
The universe is only needs a supernatural that is big enough to make its match –
nature. It still does not give us a God. And how do you define supernatural? Is
it a kind of nature we know little or nothing about? Is it paranormal? Is it
magic?
Quote: The cause must be beyond nature, which is what we mean by the term
“supernatural.” John was quick to charge me with committing the “God of the
gaps” fallacy. When we can’t figure out a natural cause, we plug God into that
gap in knowledge and say that He did it. That’s not only wrong, it’s “lazy,” as
many atheists assert. But that’s not what’s going on here. I explained that we
are not basing our conclusion on a mere “gap” in our knowledge. Those of us who
conclude that a theistic God is the cause of the universe are not arguing from
what we don’t know (a gap), but what we do know. Since space, time, and matter
had a beginning, we know that the cause can’t be made of space, time, or matter.
In fact, the conclusion that there is a spaceless, timeless, immaterial,
powerful, personal first cause flows logically from the evidence itself. If
anyone is committing a fallacy, it is the atheist. Call it the “natural law of
the gaps fallacy”—having faith that an undiscovered natural law will one day
explain the beginning of the universe.
Comment: You don't need a miracle to explain the puddle on your floor. You don't
know how it happened. Saying it is supernatural fills a gap or saying it is
natural does. Which one is based on what we know? The natural. Filling it with a
natural explanation is better than just leaving the gap. Leaving the gap is
better than filling it with magic. Any other set up is just illogical.
The reality is that the atheist scientist and the Christian both see voids and
claim to try to find answers for what is in the gap in what they already know.
It is like figuring out what the missing jigsaw piece looks like. But one of
them is not doing what they say they are doing. Decide who then!
Quote related to atheist scientist Krauss: Krauss says the cause of the universe
is not God—it is “nothing.” He cites happenings at the quantum level to dispense
with the need for God. (The quantum level is the world of the extremely small,
subatomic in size.) “One of the things about quantum mechanics is not only can
nothing become something, nothing always becomes something,” says Dr. Krauss.
“Nothing is unstable. Nothing will always produce something in quantum
mechanics.”
Comment: Seems to be saying that nothing is not really nothing. The idea that
God made all things denies that there is simply nothing.
Quote: While it is true that one can use bad philosophy, it is impossible to use
no philosophy. In fact—and this is the essential point—Krauss, Dawkins, and the
like can’t do science without philosophy.
Comment: Excellent point. Everybody is a philosopher. Thus you have to be humble
and take correction. Period.
Quote: For monotheism, the starting point is an unexplained God. For science,
the starting point is the unexplained laws of nature.
Comment: Both sides hold that it all boils down to unexplained laws. Even God
didn't and couldn't make a law that he must exist and he didn't make himself the
way he is. One side talks about laws that are not explained and calls them God
and the other does not. But it is clear that the first is overstepping the mark.
Unexplained laws should suffice.
If both are about unexplained laws then both religion and science fail to give
us the important explanation.
At least we know nature is there and works not by laws strictly but in
reasonably predictable ways so we should start with it.
Quote: God’s relationship to the law of causality is ... often misunderstood.
Contrary to what many atheists seem to believe, the law of causality does not
say that everything has a cause. The law of causality says that everything that
has a beginning has a cause, or every effect has a cause. But not everything can
be an effect.
Comment: If something did not have a cause that does not mean it is a God.
They want God to be a moral being. All who oppose morality as an objective truth
are in fact assuming it is! Everybody has a logic or morality or philosophy even
if they do it badly. So you just have a morality and that is that. It is
grounded in us not in a God. The cause stuff cannot give people the God they
want when the moral argument is such a disaster.
Quote: The laws of logic are not human conventions— that they exist
independently of human minds. First, human beings change, but logic doesn’t
change. The laws of logic provide an unchanging independent measuring stick of
truth across changing time, culture, and human belief. They are true everywhere,
at every time, and for everyone. In fact, that’s why we call them laws—the laws
of logic apply equally to all of us as do the laws of physics and math. Second,
if we each had nothing more than our own private conceptions of the laws of
logic, how could communication be possible? In order for Michael to understand
me and for me to understand Michael, we each must be accessing something
unchanging that transcends us yet is common to us. Those are the unchanging,
immaterial laws of logic. Those laws provide the bridge between minds. They also
provide a bridge to the outside world. Without that bridge, we’d be locked
inside our own skulls unable to access or make sense of the external world. We
use that bridge, but we didn’t invent it. Third, all debates presuppose that an
objective truth exists outside the mind of each debater. Each debater is trying
to show that his claims are closer to that objective truth than his opponent.
Every truth claim—whether it’s “God exists” or “God doesn’t exist”—requires
unchangeable laws of logic. If the laws of logic were changeable human
conventions, then any thought anyone conceived would be “true,” even
contradictory thoughts. So “God exists” and “God does not exist” would both be
“true” at the same time and in the same sense. How absurd. Put another way, if
the laws of logic were just inventions of the human mind, then every thought
would have to be regarded as just an invention of the human mind. With no fixed
laws by which we could reliably ground our thoughts, we couldn’t know anything
confidently. That would include anything atheists or anyone else said.
Comment: Life cannot work and we cannot co-operate without principles to agree
on. We must remember that there is no true respect for others or justice in the
absence of respect for logic - logic is best seen as a way of learning to work
with the truth and separating what is unreal from the real.
Quote: “Evolution is ultimately random,” say the atheists. True, the mutations
may be random in the sense that they do not have any goal in mind, but the
natural forces that produce the mutations are not random. Living and nonliving
things continue to exist because the foundation of the entire material world is
goal-directed, not random. Atoms continue their regular goal-directed
operations, which are held together by the four fundamental forces, which are
held together by . . . . Oops, sorry. We’re not supposed to go any further. When
we go further, we land at an uncaused, completely actualized intellect with the
attributes of a theistic God. Another problem for atheists is that there is no
way to detect randomness without the backdrop of order and goal-directedness
evident throughout the universe. So when atheists say evolution or life itself
is random, they are implicitly admitting they know of something else that is
orderly and goal-directed.
Comment: This orderly something which is goal-directed is what Turek means by
God. And something can be orderly without goals apart from just being orderly!
Turek contradicts himself. Didn't he make the claim that chance is not a thing
or force but merely describes how we do not know what caused something?
It may be that we cannot know.
It is simpler to just admit that order can appear by itself and we don't know
for sure how we got developed. Where is the humility in Turek?
Evolution is a misleading word for it can be thought to mean improvement and
direction. The word complexity is better and reminds us that all life forms are
about survival not living and nothing is protecting or guiding any life form.
Extinction can come to humanity.
Quote: To be fair, Dawkins actually means chance, but that’s hardly better.
Chance is not a cause. It’s a word we use to describe mathematical possibilities
or to cover our ignorance when we really don’t know what the cause is. There is
no causal force out there known as “chance” or “luck.” Dawkins certainly
wouldn’t accept a Christian citing “chance” or “luck” as a reason to believe in
God or the Resurrection.
Comment: A Christian who says that he believes Jesus rose from the dead is
saying he believes first of all that it was an act of God but as belief is not
knowledge the implication is that it is a belief selected for primacy among a
range of beliefs. The scale is that principally you think God did it and
secondly that it was supernatural but not down to God and thirdly that chance
did it like magic and so on. A belief only excludes what you select as your
chief belief but the other ones are there graded according to what you think is
possible and probable. Belief is not choosing one thing and nothing else but the
preferable belief from the menu that seems to fit the facts and evidence best.
Quote: The absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. Maybe
we’ll find evidence someday that natural laws can do the job. After all, isn’t
Meyer just committing the “God of the gaps” fallacy? As you remember, that’s the
fallacy where you plug God into your gap in knowledge, only to find later that a
natural cause is really responsible for the effect in question. That’s exactly
what Dr. Marshall charges Meyer with. But Meyer is in no way guilty of the “God
of the gaps” fallacy. As Meyer explains repeatedly, he’s not interpreting the
evidence based on what we don’t know, but what we do know.
Comment: It seems to be a natural cause of the gaps as well as a God of the gaps
here. But the fact is that in daily life we always fill gaps with natural causes
even if we don't know that they are. We are scientists too!
CONCLUSION: Turek fails to protect the superstitions of God and miracle and
religion by trying to put them beyond the inspection of science. He fails to
refute the scientists who see their professional and investigative methodology
as a form of atheism or naturalism - rejection of magic and supernatural.
Science is another word for observation so if it cannot see God it ignores him
and that amounts to saying he is not real.