On Atheism and Belief

So, Mr. Atheist, you don't believe in God. You say that you have no evidence that God exists. But on the other hand, do you have evidence that God doesn't exist...? No. So how can you say that there is no God? You don't have evidence of it. Your notion is based on BELIEF that there is no God. So your world view is not different from Christianity. They are both based on belief. Atheism and Christianity are both belief systems. They are on the same level.

Agnosticism is a little bit different. There are two kinds of agnostics: skeptics and seekers. The skeptics don't differ from atheists, because they refuse to believe that God exists but are open to the option that God doesn't exist. So skeptics are practically atheists but nominally agnostics. The seekers are different. They are open to both options. But if they don't think that the absolute truth exists, or that an assurance on God's existence is possible, their world view is a belief system just like atheism and Christianity. In most cases honest seekers find a solution. They end up in some belief system. So agnosticism is either temporary (honest seekers) or a belief system (post-modern seekers and skeptics). So we cannot escape the matter of BELIEF.

Has there been a time when you believed in God? If there has, then why did you believe in God? Or if there hasn't, then why did you believe that there is no God? Has someone just said to you that it's stupid to believe in God and you have believed him?

Is your belief that there is no God based on a notion that the non-seen do not exist? If so, then why do you believe that there are principles in the world? Do you see them? Or why do you believe that non-material entities, like love, exist? Have you seen it? What does it look like? What is the size and the color of it? Or why do you believe that your senses transmit you the correct information? How can you be sure that what you see is actually what you see? Or how can you be sure that what you touch is actually the way you sense it? You BELIEVE it! There is no way to escape belief.

Ok, now it's clear that belief is essential and it affects all of us. The second question is: What is the origin of the universe? How have all the things come to being? According to the current scientific explanation the universe has come to being in a great initial "explosion", the Big Bang. At the moment zero all the mass of the universe was concentrated into one single point of which density was infinite. Then, at the moment zero, the singularity started to expand, and as a result of this expansion the current universe came to being.

There are many refined and detailed theories on the first nano-seconds of the Big Bang. But science cannot say why there was a singularity of infinite density and why did it start to expand at the moment it did. What was before it? "Nothing", say the scientists. So there is no scientific explanation of the origin.

There are those who say that time itself was born at the moment of the Big Bang, and therefore, the question of what was "before" the moment zero is irrelevant. But if time itself was born in the Big Bang, the cause or the reason of the existence of the universe must be timeless. And what else could be timeless as an agent than almighty God.

Some people say that a Big Crunch happened just before the Big Bang, and another universe existed before our universe, and another before that and so on. But wait a minute... What evidence do they have on this kind of notion? Nothing. It is just imagination, pure sci-fi, modern fantasy without any evidence. And these people call themselves scientific... Hah! In their dreams! :-)

Well, talking seriously, this kind of Big Crunch is a scientific impossibility. The second law of thermodynamics, that has been proven true in many very reliable ways, clearly states that the entropy of a system never gets smaller. It can only grow. Even in the formation of a crystal, although the entropy of the crystal gets smaller, the entropy of the whole system grows. There will always be heat vanishing, diffusions and other similar effects.

A Big Crunch is possible if and only if the universe shrinks. And the shrinking of the universe is possible if and only if the entropy of the universe gets smaller or remains constant. Because the expansion of the universe always makes the entropy grow, and the only possibility in a shrinking universe is a constant entropy, there are a finite number of universes that could have preceded our universe. So the metaphysical question of what was before the first singularity still remains unanswered.

The only logical conclusion is that THE SCIENCES DO NOT HAVE THE ANSWER! If God didn't create the universe then how could it have come to being? There is absolutely no scientific way to escape this question. The only possibility is to dwell on sci-fi and start imaging childish fairy tale dreams about a possible future explanation, like the Big Crunch people do, or to admit the initial creation but to deny the other powers of God. The latter is called "deism" in western philosophy.

Ok, let's move on. Let's think about the origin of life. A fashionable explanation nowadays is the evolution. It is said that life evolved just on its own. But there are certain serious problems with this.

The first problem with the evolution is the generation of information. It is said that the new information required by the evolution is generated by mutations. But if we think about mutations most of them are neutral to the organism, some of them are harmful, and just very few are advantageous. The evolution advocates say that the natural selection takes off all the negative effects of mutations in a population and only the positive effects remain. However, this explanation has a crucial weakness in it. The amount of negative mutations would make the population to die out before any positive mutations could benefit properties advanced enough to provide a significant breeding advantage.

This can be proven by growing bacteria populations (where a new generation is born every 15 minutes) and exposing them to different mutating effects and different environmental conditions. Prof. Siegfried Scherer from München University of Technology^[1] is a well known scholar in biochemistry. He has grown 50000 generations of bacteria with mutating and varying environmental conditions and has noticed only degeneration - no evolution. If mutations are as frequent as the evolution theory requires the populations die out before any macroscopic evolution happens. And if this is the case with bacteria, which are much more simple in structure than any other form of life and thus more probable to evolve, it is highly unlikely that anything more evolving would happen with the more complex organisms where the mutation should take place in the gamete line to be inherited to the next generation.

The second major problem with evolution is the lack of intermediate fossils. If macroevolution was true there would be tens of thousands times more intermediate fossils and other signs of transition in the world than there are now. We have only a few so-called "intermediate fossils" that are supposed to prove the evolution, but firstly they require a lot of imagination to be held as intermediates and secondly there is little evidence supporting them as "missing links" between two other species and not being independent species without connection to the evolution.

The third thing is that by analyzing life's complexity there are signs of design in it. The scientific method called "well-defined irreducible complexity", that is used for example in crime investigation and exposing scientific frauds to find out if there is design or just coincidence, can be applied in life too. The branch of biology that does this is called "Intelligent Design". (You can use Google and put "intelligent design" as a key word to find out more information.) Intelligent design (ID) has very interesting and scientifically completely valid results of design in life. Life hasn't evolved. It has been designed! Of course ID-scientists do not take a stance on what or who the designer is - that is not a thing of science to do - but ID results are very strong evidence that there is an active creator behind the origin of life. Deism starts to fade away...

The first conclusion of all this is that we cannot escape belief - no world view can, so they do not differ from each other in this matter, all of them are based on belief. The second conclusion is that the origin of the universe calls for creation. The third conclusion is that the origin of life calls for creation. There is absolutely no scientific reason to escape God. It is highly probable, perhaps even indisputable that there is a creator.

Of course people can always make acrobatic loopholes to escape the belief in God but what I want to say is that it is evident that there is more than just the atoms. A well-known scientist and a mathematician Blaise Pascal said that there is enough light in the world to believe in God and enough darkness not to believe in Him. For those who refuse to admit God's existence there will always be enough ways to deny, and for those who believe that God exists there will always be enough support for it. So, it is the not the matter of lacking evidence, it's the matter of will of finding out.

– Mikko Satama –