Welcome To: Ways To Faith

Ways to Faith > Blog > Science > Cosmology > Religious Belief
The Reasons
  • About Us
  • Blog
  • Contact Form
  • Persecution
    Christian Persecution
    Persecution Articles

    East Turkistan Persecution

    East Turkestan is a region of China with mass concentration camps and prisons.

    Date: May 19, 2020

    East Turkistan Persecution East Turkistan persecution has been hidden by the Chinese government for decades  However,... Read More »


    “So Help Me God Oath”

    Many in Congress refused to administer the swearing in oath with "so help me God" included.

    Date: April 10, 2020

    The naturalization oath is taken by every person becoming a citizen of the United States Atheists - in their continuing... Read More »


    Earlier Articles

    Jihadist Fulani in Nigeria

    Nigeria has seen a marked increase in anti-Christians with executions of innocent people by Islamic extremists.

    Date: April 9, 2020

    Anti-Christian violence by the Jihadist Fulani in Nigeria has again spiked  The Nigeria based International Society for... Read More »


    Persecution Statistics

    Persecution statistics give empirical evidence that Christians are the most persecuted group in the world.

    Date: February 19, 2020

    This may be the most dangerous time in history to be a Christian throughout the world  Persecution statistics document... Read More »


    More Articles

    Persecution After Death


    Persecution in Nigeria


    Persecution in Europe


    Persecution in China


    Church Persecution in China


    Christians in India


    Chinese Persecution


    Near Genocide Levels


    Church Vandalism


    Egyptian Oppression


    Image
    ...
  • Better Lives
    Christians Lead a Better Life
    Image Slider
    ...
    ...
    ...

    Christians are Happier

    Christians are happier than their secular neighbors.

    Date: February 14, 2020

    Many recent studies have evaluated whether Christians are happier than their secular neighbors and compared the... Read More »


    Work Ethic

    Homeschooling and Achievement Scores

    Date: February 13, 2020

    The effect of religious practice on work ethic has been a topic of investigation for many years  There has been much... Read More »


    Christians Benefit Society

    Christians benefit all of society.

    Date: February 9, 2020

    Christians benefit society because their religious beliefs inform their behavior  This favorable behavior means... Read More »


    Christian Children

    Children in conservative Protestant familiar have increased academic achievement compared to their secular counterparts in government schools.

    Date: February 8, 2020

    Christian children do better in life than do their secular counterparts on many levels  These differences begin at birth... Read More »


    More Articles

    Faith and Family


    Christians and Depression


    Christians and Success


    Christians and the Law


    Prison Ministries


    Christians and Education


    Christians and Charity


The Big Bang is the creation event of the universe occurring 13.78 billion years ago. The theological implications are obvious.

Religious Belief

Posted in December 28, 2019 by David

Categories: Cosmology, Philosophical, Science

Tags: Agnosticism, Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design

Telescopes are frequently built on mountain tops to get above the clouds and atmosphere.

Image by Ondřej Šponiar from Pixabay

Emerging cosmology is consistent with religious belief and not with atheism.  That is a remarkable statement only because it is correct.

I have always loved astronomy. While I was in high school, I was President of the Astronomy Club for three years, ground my telescope mirrors, and seriously considered going into astronomy as a career.  Religious belief seems to be consistent with emerging new cosmology.

I was the kid who would go to the public library and check out the books on astronomy. I got to the point where I had read all the popular astronomy books written for the public and found I needed to learn much more mathematics to make the rest understandable.

One thing that became clear was the schizophrenic attitude many astronomers have toward religion and science. One the one hand, even very skeptical naturalists can only gasp in awe when looking through a telescope at Jupiter or a distant galaxy.

If there is anything that will suggest religious belief the hardest skeptic, it is the cosmos.

And yet, we know that many cosmologists view the cosmos with a decidedly atheistic eye. They have been taught from youth that science can give no ground to the metaphysical. There are no higher powers than science and mathematics, and Christianity is for the weak-minded.

Dawkins, while not an astronomer, did view believers in a rather condescending manner calling them the Dims while, of course, his crowd of pagans is referred to as the “Brights.” Just let that sink in for a bit.

And of course, we all know that Carl Sagan, the television personality of cosmology, was a hard atheist believing to the end that all would eventually be explainable by the onward march of increasing knowledge.

But is that a universally held opinion?

The Design Inference and Religious Belief

Mathematics describes the physical world; the laws of nature are tremendously fine-tuned to permit life.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The advance of physics has led to some peculiar discoveries. One of these is that the physical laws of science are precisely set to enable all matter to exist, let alone life.

Any minute division in many of these physical laws of nature from their current values would mean the end of all matter, planets, stars, and of course – life.

But what is even more surprising is there is no need for these values to be what they are; many of them could be any number of other values,

The fact is that many of these values are exquisitely fine-tuned to the extremely narrow variance required for life to exist. Cosmologists became somewhat annoyed when asked about whether there was intelligence behind the apparent intelligent design of nature and astronomy.

Fred Hoyle, one of the more famous astronomers, noted

I do not believe that any scientist who examined the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed.

Another famous astronomer had his atheism challenged for religious belief,

The laws [of physics] … seem themselves to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design.

The Christmas Star is not definitely identified, but has multiple characteristics mentioned in the Bible.

Christmas Star – Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

He further notes,

“[There] is for me powerful evidence that there is ‘something going on’ behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming.

George Greenstein in his book Symbiotic Universe noted regarding religious belief from cosmology,

As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency – or, rather, Agency – must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit?

Tony Rothman is a theoretical physicist and popular-level science writer who wrote an article on the so-called Anthropic Principle. This is the idea that the universe that has the characteristics required for the existence of life (particularly for humans and intelligent life), and noted that,

The medieval theologian who gazed at the night sky through the eyes of Aristotle and saw angels moving the spheres in harmony has become the modern cosmologist who gazes at the same sky through the eyes of Einstein and sees the hand of God not in angels but in the constants of nature. … When confronted with the order and beauty of the universe and the strange coincidences of nature, it’s very tempting to take the leap of faith from science into religion. I am sure many physicists want to. I only wish they would admit it.

It is an interesting article coming from a naturalist that the evidence for religious belief is becoming more evident with the passage of years and the accumulation of further knowledge.

The journal Nature – one of the most prestigious journals in existence, published an article from cosmologists Bernard Carr and Martin Rees. They state in their summary,

Nature does exhibit remarkable coincidences and these do warrant some explanation.”

Carr wrote in a later article,

One would have to conclude either that the features of the universe invoked in support of the Anthropic Principle are only coincidences or that the universe was indeed tailor-made for life. I will leave it to the theologians to ascertain the identity of the tailor!

The Hubble Deep Space image demonstrates the vast universe with over 15,000 galaxies in this one image./

Deep Sky Image showing hundreds of galaxies – By NASA and the European Space Agency. Edited by Noodle snacks – http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2004/07/image/a/warn/, Public Domain, Link

Freeman Dyson suggests a religious belief when he wrote as a conclusion in one of his books,

The problem here is to try to formulate some statement of the ultimate purpose of the universe. In other words, the problem is to read the mind of God.

And,

I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming

Vera Kistiakowsky who is professor emerita at MIT and past president of the Association of Women in Science noted regarding religious belief,

The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of the physical world calls for the divine.

Arno Penzias who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of the cosmic background radiation noted,

Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say “supernatural”) plan.

Alexander Polyakov, a theoretical physicist and a fellow at Moscow’s Landau Institute noted,

We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it. So there is a chance that the best of all possible mathematics will be created out of physicists’ attempts to describe nature.

China’s famous astrophysicist Fang Lizhi and Li Shuxian noted

A question that has always been considered a topic of metaphysics or theology – the creation of the universe – has now become an area of active research in physics.

Roger Penrose – a colleague of Stephen Hawking, noted,

I would say the universe has a purpose. It’s not there just somehow by chance.

George Ellis, another colleague of Hawking, noted at a paper delivered at the Second Venice Conference on Cosmology and Philosophy,

Amazing fine-tuning occurs in the laws that make this [complexity] possible. Realization of the complexity of what is accomplished makes it very difficult not to use the word “miraculous” without taking a stand as to the ontological status of that word.

And then there is Stephen Hawking. He noted,

It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.

Edward Harrison was a cosmologist who makes this deduction,

Here is the cosmological proof of the existence of God – the design argument of Paley – updated and refurbished. The fine-tuning of the universe provides prime facie evidence of the deistic design. Take your choice: Blind chance that requires multitudes of universes or design that requires only one … Many scientists, when they admit their views, incline toward the teleological design argument.

A nebula or gas cloud in space - we can tell through spectroscopy the elements that are contained within gas clouds thousands of light years away from Earth.

Nebula – Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

Alan Sandridge – the winner of the Crafoord Prize in Astronomy (equivalent to the Nobel Prize for Physics), noted,

I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but in the exploration for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing.

Robert Griffiths who won the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics noted,

If we need an atheist for a debate, I go to the philosophy department. The physics department isn’t much use.

Robert Jastrow, a self-proclaimed agnostic, describes what has happened to his colleagues as they investigate the universe,

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Fine Tuning Inference Among Astronomers

Astronomers are up to date on the fine-tuning of the universe and its inferences to design can refute the claim that the universe appears to have been made by a Designer.

The appearance of fine-tuning and inference for design is just so overwhelming.

Every year, there are more discoveries that demonstrate the exquisitely fine detail of everything throughout the Universe including the Universe itself, matter, galaxies, stars, planets, interstellar density, water, chemicals, atoms, subatomic particles, quantum physics, to name a few.

The evidence is so overwhelming as to be irrefutable.

The Personality of the Creator

Interestingly, it is possible to derive several characteristics for the proposed designer from what we know about the universe in general.

One characteristic is that the Designer seems to be very interested in his Creation and care for living things. We know that since the Creator made matter and time – he must be outside of matter and time. Of course, the Creator has to be ver power and of supreme intelligence.

But what is particularly interesting is the size of the Universe – why is it so big? We estimate there are about a hundred-billion-trillion stars in the universe – why are there so many?

It turns out there had to be a huge amount of stars so that the universe functions correctly. It is important so that during a very brief moment in time, there could be intelligent life somewhere.

This is due to the need for a precise amount of baryons – namely, the protons and neutrons from which all of us are made.

The baryon density determines how efficiently nuclear physics takes place. The amount of stars spread across the universe makes a certain average density of baryons. It turns out that this needed to be an exact number so that during the first few minutes of the universe’s existence the correct amount of deuterium would be made.

If the baryon density were too small, then there would be too little deuterium and helium made that the heavier elements could not form in stars.

Alternatively, if the baryon density were too large in those first few moments, then there would be too much deuterium and helium made and the stars would burn much too quickly and life could again – not form.

This means the average density of matter throughout the universe has to be just right.

Atheist Responses to Religious Belief

Atheists find themselves in a difficult situation when trying to explain the universe. The inference for design is so strong – and getting stronger – than it is obvious to an impartial scientist.  Of course, it is then up to the scientist to determine how to interpret this obvious inference for design.

Some hope to escape this inference through appeals to a multiverse with an infinite time while other arguments have recently been forthcoming. We will examine these arguments in other articles.

Summary

The steady progress of science in many disciplines including astronomy, biology, chemistry, archaeology among others continues to demonstrate increasing evidence for design.

This is a particular problem for the non-theist who wishes to avoid mention of metaphysical ideas in science.

If the opposite situation were true, that is, if continued discoveries showed no inference toward design and decreasing need for God in an explanatory sense, then cosmologists could reasonably claim that more time is needed for more discoveries.

However, this does not appear to be the case. Instead, the passage to time moves to increasing evidence for design – not decreasing. The more we learn, the more complexity is demonstrating resulting in increasing difficulty to explain the universe through natural means.

We look forward to future discoveries of the next few decades to add to the design inference and greater difficulty for the atheist option.


related posts

Made For Life

The speed of light is now known not to change over space or time.

by David : Categories: Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Philosophical, Science Tags: Agnosticism, Fine Tuning, Physical Constants

Date: June 3, 2020

The universe seems to be made for life; it seems like the universe was made in such a way as to promote the existence of intelligent life.  The question that has plagued cosmologists for decades is how this extraordinary fine-tuning came into existence.  An analogy might help in understanding this… Read More »

The Multiverse

The Andromeda Galaxy distance can be measured with Cepheid variables among other means. This is one of the few galaxies that is actually moving toward the Milky Way galaxy.

by David : Categories: Cosmology, Science Tags: Big Bang, Cosmology, Fine Tuning, Intelligent Design, Matter, Time

Date: December 26, 2019

The multiverse has been proposed as a means for getting around the statistical impossibility of forming the universe by chance. A statistical impossibility is frequently taken as being any event that has less than one chance in 10^200. This number is chosen as the maximum number of events that could… Read More »

The Divine Watchmaker

watch

by David : Categories: Cosmology, Philosophical, Science Tags: Big Bang, Cosmology, Fine Tuning, Time

Date: June 1, 2019

The Divine Watchmaker The illustration of a “divine watchmaker” has been a popular thought experiment to illustrate the involvement of an intelligent designer of life. The evidence for God as the Designer of the world has been a popular argument for the existence of God.  The appearance of design is… Read More »

The Multiverse

The Multiverse

by David : Categories: Cosmology, Philosophical, Science Tags: Big Bang, Cosmology, Fine Tuning, Matter, Time

Date: May 31, 2019

The Multiverse No science concept has caught the public imagination more than that of a multiverse.  In the popular imagination, it is the theory that there are other universes present simultaneously with our own, with people resembling us acting out their lives along with a completely different storyline.  There is… Read More »

Belief in God
Emmaus

Leave A Response to "Religious Belief" Cancel reply

We are glad you have chosen to leave a comment. Please keep in mind that comments are moderated according to our comment policy.

The Reasons for Faith

Christian faith is not based upon unfounded hope.  It offers the best explanation for the world we see today and the solution for an unfulfilled life.

Christians are better educated, more wealthy, happier, and contribute more to society than any other group.

Christianity is affirmed by science, history, cosmology, probability and statistics, linguistics, archaeology, and logical evidence.

Resources

This site is like a gatekeeper.

We cannot provide an exhaustive analysis of every Christian topic – that would take a library.

What we do is to provide an introduction to topics of interest to the general public, and then provide information for a deeper investigation.

Learn More About Us and Legal Information

  • About Us
  • Contact Page
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service

Copyright©: 2018-2023 All Rights Reserved