A question that I occasionally posed to my students is, “What’s stronger, the truth or a lie?”1 After discussing the idea, it usually came down to this, that truth will prevail. Why so? Essentially, a lie has no substance of its own, but the truth just is. A lie can stand only as long as the truth is obscured. Truth is permanent and falsehood is temporary. Truth is founded on reality, falsehood isn’t.
The new theatrical documentary The Story of Everything has challenged the materialistic worldview by presenting scientifically verified evidence that exposes the untenable presuppositions of a closed, purely naturalistic universe. Evidence for the design of the physical universe and life on Earth has revealed the reality that what is has its source in a mind of transcendent intelligence.
Nature has always exhibited surprising attributes that predictably elude human expectations. History affirms that the most brilliant deductions of human reason often got it wrong, as the following examples remind us: the geocentric model of the solar system; circular planetary orbits based on the notion of celestial perfection; the natural state of an object is at rest; spontaneous generation of living organisms.
Technological advancements, coupled with solid theoretical understanding of the limitations of nature, have for the first time in human history shifted the debate away from quasi-scientific arguments, sometimes rooted in ignorance, into the clearer purview of scientific knowledge based on reality.
Still Exerting Influence
However, some popularly believed misconceptions still exert their influence on people. For example, let’s imagine a “warm little pond,” suggested by Darwin as the source of life. The trouble with this image as a starting point is that it conjures up in our minds something like a mud puddle or a swamp. Our everyday experience with actual warm little ponds unavoidably includes an environment already teeming with microbial life.
Why would most people avoid drinking stagnant water from a puddle or a swamp? Probably not for fear of ingesting some dissolved salts or minerals, but because we suspect that the water is teeming with bacteria that could wreak havoc with our digestive system. With this in mind, it’s not too surprising that Darwin’s offhand comment has for many people the ring of plausibility to it as the explanation for the origin of life.
In reality, if we’re talking about the origin of the first life, we must imagine a sterile environment surpassing anything achievable in the cleanest laboratory on Earth. “Sterility” in laboratory conditions is typically “assured” if the probability is less than 1 in a million that a viable microorganism is present. But before the first life appeared in the universe, the probability of life being present was, by definition, zero.
No Basis of Credibility
Expecting nature to move from nonlife to life, starting from a 100 percept sterile mix of chemicals, has no basis of credibility in modern science. Achieving just one aspect of a viable living organism, namely self-replication, has been mathematically demonstrated to exceed the bounds of probability within our universe.
…we have already argued from von Neumann’s mathematical analysis of a general self-replicating automaton, the minimum complexity inherent in such a mechanism (or organism) defies natural explanations.
Ongoing research in synthetic organic chemistry supports the conclusion that life could not have arisen from a warm little pond or any other natural source. It’s not reasonable to expect that any new discovery is going to reveal a hitherto unknown pathway from sterile nonlife to life. What we already know about the limitations of natural processes overturns that speculation, placing it on the shelf with past false ideas about the universe.
The Story of Everything, which you can now host at your church, systematically presents the growing body of evidence from cosmology, biology, and other fields from the last century that points to an emerging paradigm shift in academic science. The assertion that science confirms materialism is dead. The evidence points to intelligent design and a transcendent, immaterial mind as the source of the universe and life.
In my book Canceled Science, I refer to a science education initiative that purports to institutionalize naturalism.2 These “Hallmarks of Science” include three premises:
- “Modern science seeks explanations for observed phenomena that rely solely on natural causes.”
- “Science progresses through the creation and testing of models of nature that explain the observations as simply as possible.”
- “A scientific model must make testable predictions about natural phenomena that will force us to revise or abandon the model if the predictions do not agree with observations.”
My comment in the book on this viewpoint is relevant to our discussion here.
Most of this is fine, but it’s worth asking, is the first premise subject to the third premise? What if our study of some natural phenomenon showed that it could not arise solely from natural causes? In such a case, we would have to abandon either the first premise, or the third premise.3
A Paradigm Shift
With regard to the origin and development of life, the beginning of the universe, and its fine tuning for life, science has uncovered “natural phenomenon” that “could not arise solely from natural causes.” A paradigm shift in our understanding of the nature of reality comes, then, from recognizing that the materialistic worldview has become outmoded. Continued adherence to the premise of naturalism will only steer the trajectory of our grasp of reality further from the truth. If more convincing evidence is needed, just wait; it will come.
Notes
- Eric Hedin, Canceled Science: What Some Atheists Don’t Want You to See, (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2021) p. 47.
- Hedin, Canceled Science, (2021) p. 50.
- Hedin, Canceled Science, (2021) p. 51.