Truth

Can anything be bigger than God?

At first glance this appears to be an unacceptable question. God must be unimaginably greater than anything.

Than anything except truth.

For if, as the naturalistic atheists maintain, the truth is that there is no God that truth is greater than God. God cannot be greater than the truth.

The theory of evolution is sometimes set out as that ultimate truth that dispenses with God or gods. Galileo is often cited.

On discovering, in 1604, a supernova and having previously spotted sunspots the prevailing truth of the academic day - that of Aristotle - seemed to be untrue. Both academics and the Church authoriies of the day resisted his apparent heresy to maintain their truth that was not, in truth, true.

Today, claim the Neo-Darwinists, we have the same situation. The truth is that a natural process made everything. This truth makes God redundant and those who believe in God(s) are deluded.

Well, we've seen that the evidence points exactly the opposite way. Information - that is, an outside agency - is scientifically necessary to make a beginning. But then there are those monkeys. Remember them? The ones that type randomly trying to produce a work of Shakespeare. It cannot be done in the available time and space.

So how, on this theory, did the processes make the complexity of the world we find ourselves in? "Ah, " says Richard Dawkins et al., "You see when a monkey types the right letter, it is compared with the target letter and if correct, he stops". The monkey eventually hits 'W' and, matching the first word of the play, holds it right there to set off the writing of Hamlet. The monkey knows his job is done. In this way the impossible mountain of complexity is scaleable.

For all his protestations, Richard Dawkins does not believe in a Blind Watchmaker at all. He has to believe - because his logical mind shows him the truth - that there is a script on to which Darwin's theoretical randomness is being written.

Richard, who wrote the script? "Ridiculous," says Dawkins. "If you're going to say God is forever and beyond time and the mega-playwrght you might as well say that DNA is, or a spaghetti monster". Except we know for sure - he knows for sure - that DNA is not for ever and outside of time, and nobody actually professes to know a spaghetti monster which, anyway, presupposes a prior spaghetti maker. On the other hand, God is the plausible explanation of all necessary outside agency.

The Bible - and God - do not claim to be above the truth. They cannot be. Rather, the Lord Jesus taught that he is the Way, the Truth and the Life. The Word and Person of God are the most important aspect of the truth, and the part which if neglected leaves humanity's largest hole.

Dawkins

The side blurb on this blog mentions my anti-hero is Richard Dawkins (though I also share his desire to tell the truth as I understand it)

I should say that by anti-hero I do not have anything against Professor Dawkins personally but that his attacks on my Lord make him someone I least admire. You can hear the man himself on this link at the BBC

Listen out for his answer, if you can call it that, to the question "What's the point?". Compare his answer to that of the apostle Paul,

For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain

I think, in his supposed quest for truth, if he thinks 'there's no less of a point if he doesn't believe in God than if he did' I fear he's missed a trick there.

Lennox

Without doubt two of my Sabbatical highlights were listening to a sermon and, on another day, a lecture by John Lennox. He is a Mathematics Professor at Oxford University and applies his knowledge of things like algorithmic incompressibility and other less-than-everyday categories to the Science and Religion issues raised by the likes of his fellow-Professor Dawkins.

He convincingly shows that DNA, by its very complexity and randomness, makes natural selection impossible as an explanation of humans (and a lot else). In a famous experiment monkeys were given the chance to produce a Shakespeare Play. The real monkeys were markedly and hilariously unsuccessful.

Some more imaginery monkeys were put to the task in the form of a computer programme, randomly producing letters and yet their infinite energy and concentration is also doomed to fail.

No, science shows what every believer knows; that there is more to us than natural selection. This extra to natural selection might, in the neutral sense, be described as 'information'. To be fair, Richard Dawkins concedes the need for this himself. In another blog, with John Lennox's help, we can deal with his unbelievable answer to the problem. Meanwhile, here's a clue to the right answer: