Question: What will be your main [debate] points in opposing atheism/humanism?

Question: You have three debates scheduled for the end of February near Toronto, Canada: with a Hindu, a Muslim, and an atheist/humanist, one right after the other--quite a challenge! What will be your main points in opposing atheism/humanism?

Response: I will need much prayer. I can do nothing in my own wisdom and strength.

We live in an incredibly complex universe on an earth teeming with life, all of which science has been studying and attempting to explain for centuries. We are told that no scientist believes in God anymore. Yet the brilliant men who laid the foundation for modern science (Bacon, Boyle, Dalton, Descarte, Faraday, Joule, Kelvin, Kepler, Maxwell, Mendel, Newton, Pascal, Pasteur, et al.) were theists, who saw the hand of God in His orderly creation making science possible. Newton, regarded as the most original and influential thinker in the history of science, "wrote and published more works on interpretation of the Bible than on mathematics and physics."¹ Only lately have atheists aggressively taken the position of spokespersons for science.

Even Stephen Hawking admitted, "It is difficult to discuss the beginning of the universe without mentioning the concept of God." "Fritz" Schaefer, director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry, University of Georgia, third most quoted chemist today, has said:

A significant number of Christians are among top scientists and modern Nobel laureates. William D. Phillips, for example, winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, "once quipped that so many of his colleagues were Christians that he couldn't walk across his church's fellowship hall without 'tripping over a dozen physicists....'" Professor Richard Bube of Stanford says, "There are [proportionately] as many atheistic truck drivers as atheistic scientists."³ But among Nobel laureates, the number who recognize the hand of God in the universe is very high.

The atheist must explain everything without God, which science cannot do. Everything is made of energy, but science cannot tell us what energy is or how or why it came into existence. Stephen Hawking asks, "Why does the universe go to all the trouble of bothering to exist?" Why is a question that atheism cannot answer. Matter simply exists; it contains no explanation of why. The maker's purpose provides the meaning for anything that is made. Unless there is a Creator, the universe and all in it, including mankind, has no purpose or meaning. Atheists confess this fact.

Today's most famous atheist, Richard Dawkins, boasts of the consequences of atheism: "There exists no objective basis on which to elevate one species above another. Chimp and human, lizard and fungus, we have all evolved over some three billion years by...natural selection."⁴ No evolutionist could argue with this repugnant statement.

Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, as an atheist and evolutionist, begins his best-known book with this statement: "The Astonishing Hypothesis is that 'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."⁵ The average person would reject such nonsense. He knows that he is not just a bag of molecules but a thinking person, who carefully weighs choices, experiences joys, sorrows, hopes, fears, remorse, and regrets. Crick's atheism traps him in a net of meaninglessness.

Attempting to describe the physical world, science provides names and categories but can't tell us what anything really is. Energy, electron, gravity, space, time, life, and death-what do they mean? What is life; what is its source? How is it imparted to lifeless matter-and why does it depart so quickly? As Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger said, "[Science] is ghastly silent about all...that really matters to us....It knows nothing of...good or bad, God and eternity....Whence came I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question....Science has no answer to it."⁶

Atheism "explains" that the universe began with a sudden, almost infinite, burst of energy called the "Big Bang." But science can't tell us where this energy came from, why it got together and exploded at that particular moment-nor how out of a giant explosion the orderly arrangement, from molecules to galaxies, occurred.

Furthermore, atheism faces dozens of "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" conundrums that stop evolution before it can even start. For example, DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is what makes protein, yet DNA is itself made of protein. So, which came first: the DNA that makes protein or the protein out of which DNA is made?

There is no life without DNA, but DNA itself has life. What came first, the DNA that is essential for life or the life that is essential for DNA? Living cells are made up of incredibly complex nano-chemical machinery, and some of this machinery synthesizes DNA. So, which came first, the DNA without which there could be no cell or the cell without which there could be no DNA?

The problem of "origins" is one of the major questions for which science has no answer. The most amazing thing in the universe is life, but science neither knows from whence life comes nor what it is. There is no life without enzymes, although they themselves are not living things. And there are no enzymes without life because it takes life to produce them. Which came first-the enzymes without which there can be no life or the life without which there can be no enzymes? The enzymes that make the amino acid histidine contain histidine. Which came first-the histidine or the enzymes that manufacture it, which themselves contain histidine?

Many different enzymes are required to translate the genetic information encoded on the DNA. Yet the enzymes are themselves encoded by DNA. Thus, the genetic code cannot be translated except by products of translation. This is a vicious circle that allows for only one conclusion: the molecules that encode the information and those that decode it existed simultaneously from the beginning. That fact cannot be explained by any gradual natural process.

It requires an act of creation by God. Yet the major motive of Darwin (who knew nothing of DNA) was to prove that God was not needed to explain life and the universe.

As noted, the incredible nano-chemical machinery in the cell is responsible for synthesizing DNA. But it is the DNA that carries the code that constructs and operates the cellular machinery. Which came first, the DNA that carries the information for producing each cell or the machinery in the cell produced by DNA, which must first make the DNA? Obviously, both had to exist simultaneously from the very beginning or neither would exist. That fact requires a creative act of God.

The genetic code has vital editing machinery, which is itself encoded in the DNA. What came first, the machinery that edits DNA or the DNA that produces the editing machinery?

Again, the DNA molecule is made of protein; but it is the DNA by which alone protein is produced. DNA cannot function without at least 75 pre-existing proteins-but only DNA can produce these 75 proteins. The machinery to convert the DNA information into the protein is itself made of the protein it alone can produce. There is only one sensible answer to the classic question, "Which came first?" Obviously, God.

The Law of Biogenesis, which Pasteur proved, states, "Life only comes from life." That ended the superstition of "spontaneous generation." The alleged Big Bang would have sterilized everything a trillion times over, making it impossible for any life to exist thereafter.

How could life come out of death? Of Jesus Christ, one with the Father, who created everything, the Bible says, "In him was life" (Jn:1:4In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
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Endnotes

1. Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006), 162.
2. U.S. News & World Report, December 23, 1991; See also http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9501/bigbang2.html.
3. Charles Colson, “BreakPoint Commentaries; Health & Science: The Nobel Scientists,” http://www.breakpoint.org/listing article.sp?ID=4918&print=1.
4. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 30th anniversary edition, 2006), Foreword to the First Edition.
5. Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Touchstone/Simon& Schuster, 1994), 3.
6. Erwin Schrödinger, quoted in Quantum Questions, ed. Ken Wilbur (Boston, MA: New Science Library, Shambhala, 1984), 81.