I don't believe there was a prime mover.
I don't believe there was a first cause of a divine kind.
I think we have better and further and brighter explanations for the origins of things than the idea of a supernatural.
We are divided, as between those of us who attribute our presence here to the laws of biology and the laws of physics, and those who are conceited enough, I would say arrogant enough, in fact, to think that they are here as the consequence of a divine design.
There's all the difference in the world between those two worldviews and the big difference is one of them has evidence for it and the other doesn't.
And one of them will say in advance what would refute it.
I can tell you, if you ask me, what evidence, if presented, would mean I'd have to change my mind, and the theist will never do that.
He will never tell you in advance, show me this and I'll stop believing in it.
There's always an infinite replenishment of the infinitely renewable resource of faith.
In fact, it's the humility of it that makes me laugh at it in a way the most.
They say that they're humble, these believers in God.
They want to be written up as modest because they think that of course that God tells them.
They're worms, originally sinful ingrates incurable, made out of dust in one narrative, out of a clot of blood in the Quranic.
Off to a pretty shaky start, condemned since an original fall of man.
Nonetheless, cheer up.
The universe is designed with you in mind.
This is a depraved form of sadomasochism in my view.
It's not good for you to go from this terrible abjection and serfdom in the one instance to this belief that you are the center of creation and the object of the cosmos in the other.
It's a terrible alteration, a neurotic alteration, between being much too servile and much too arrogant.
But just locally, what would it be to believe this?
Suppose you did believe that everything that brought us here was by design.
Well, we know that 999 of all species that have ever existed just on this planet have become extinct.
So heaven has already watched almost 100 of its creation die off, often in very unpleasant, callous circumstances with folded arms.
And that's billions of years of geological time.
Some people say the Homo sapiens has been around for 100000 years, some for as long as a quarter of a million.
No one says less than 100,000.
Francis Collins, the great Christian believer who did the Human Genome Project, says certainly 100000.
I'll take 100.
Richard Dawkins thinks it's more.
I'll take 100.
What does it mean if we're divinely supervised and divinely created and looked out for?
It means that for 98 or so thousand of those years humans, homo sapiens, were being born dying, half of them in childbirth, I would think.
Life expectancy maybe of 20 years, maybe 30 people dying essentially of their teeth out of hideous diseases, living in permanent fear.
Where are the earthquakes coming from?
Where are the lightning strikes coming from?
Why is all this?
What are these diseases that hit us?
We don't know about microbes.
We have no idea.
That's to say nothing about the fights with neighboring tribes over women, over land, over meat, over subsistence, the torture, the violence, the cruelty.
The first 98,000 years, heaven watches this going on.
Perfect insouciance.
And something like 2,000 to 3,000 years ago decides, right, we have to intervene now.
We have to do something about this.
Well, what would be the best way of intervening to try and redeem this rather bleak picture?
What about having somebody tortured to death in an obscure part of the Middle East?
That ought to cure it.
Or if you're a Muslim, What about getting an illiterate epileptic shepherd to start babbling and saying that he's been talking to an archangel?
Or what about inventing the figure of Moses in a mountain that's never yet been found by any geographer in Mount Sinai?
That's what you'd have to believe, and that's why I ask myself why do the worshippers of this God want to convict him of being such a crummy designer?
Most of his creations die off and the rest suffer miserably and the redemptive offers just don't somehow take of being cruel and capricious and bungling and incompetent.
Why?
And callous as a father.
And so, since this is as far as I can get now, I have to tell you why I don't think the idea of an eternal father is a good one.
When I next get the chance to draw breath, but thank you for staying with me this far.
I agree very much with Christopher Hitchens.
It is repudiation of many of the evils that he claims have been done in the name of God.
But I've learned to distinguish between the greatness of God and the inexcusable evil that has been done by those professing his name.
And so I do not deduce that God is not great and that religion poisons everything.
After all, if I fail to distinguish between the genius of Einstein and the abuse of his science to create weapons of mass destruction, I might be tempted to say science is not great and technology poisons everything.
As I look back at the evils of atheist regimes of the 20th century, I might also be tempted to say atheism is not great.
It has poisoned everything.
As it is, I hold that science shows some of the greatness of God.
The famous physicist James Clark Maxwell, who discovered electromagnetic theory.
Inscribed above the door in his laboratory in Cambridge University, the words great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them.
Yet Christopher Hitchens says thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation of anything.
I find it impossible, as a scientist, to take such a statement seriously, as if using a microscope and a Rembrandt painting could disprove the existence of Rembrandt himself.
The idea that God and science are mutually exclusive explanations of the universe is as wrong as saying that internal combustion and Henry Ford are mutually exclusive explanations of the automobile.
They are complementary explanations.
One explains how it works, the other why it exists.
To think that as the reach of our instruments increases, the greatness of God the Creator somehow diminished, is to make the mistake of confusing mechanism with agency.
When Newton discovered the law of gravity, he didn't say now, I know how the universe works, I don't need God.
No, his wonder at how it was done increased his admiration for the creator who'd done it that way.
And Newton wrote the most famous scientific treatise of all time, the Principia Mathematica, in the hope that it would persuade the thinking man to believe in a deity.
Telescopes can show us the wonder of the night sky.
But science didn't put the stars there, nor did the laws of biology and physics.
They describe what is there, they don't put it there.
Stephen Hawking says the usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the question why there should be a universe for the model to describe.
He then asks, why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
Does it need a creator?
Yes, it does need a creator.
Alan Sandage, widely regarded as one of the fathers of modern astronomy, discovered quasars, said.
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 is the explanation for the miracle of existence.
Why there is something rather than nothing.
And another giant of cosmology, Arno Penzias, won his Nobel Prize for discovering an echo of the Big Bang.
But Penzias could see how unimaginably greater is the God who conceived of this beginning to space time in the first place.
Astronomy, he says, leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with a very delicate balance, needed to provide exactly the right conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying, one might say supernatural, plan.
Einstein had the brilliant insight that the speed of light was an absolute constant.
But what shall we say of the creative mind that said, let there be light, and there was light.
To measure the speed of light is one thing, to create light is another.
Far from science, showing God is not great, as Christopher Hitchens suggests.
The very opposite is the case.
It was belief in God that motivated the advance of science in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Galileo Copernicus Kepler, Newton expected to find law in nature because they believed in a great law giver.
Science is important, but it has its limitations.
It cannot answer the questions of a child.
What are we here for?
What is the meaning of life?
Nor can it tell us whether literature or art is good or bad.
Hence an atheism that insists that science is the only way to truth diminishes human beings.
This is very obvious to many of my Russian friends.
We thought we could abolish God and retain a value for human beings, but we found we couldn't.
Do away with the greatness of God, ladies and gentlemen, and you can do away with the nobility of human beings endowed with all the potential of hearts and minds made in God's image.
You also do away with their freedom.
You are left with a mindless, unguided process that somehow threw humans up at its endless lottery to exist without ultimate hope, for a tiny moment only to be crushed by the same blind forces that produced them.
Some freedom that.
But there's another deep problem here.
To say that God is not great is a moral statement.
To say he's tyrannical is a moral statement and that must be based on some moral standard.
Otherwise you couldn't distinguish evil from its opposite.
But if there is no eternal base for values external to humanity, how can Mr Hitchens or anyone else's standards be anything but limited human conventions, ultimately meaningless products of a blind, unguided evolutionary process,
How can random mutations and blind selection produce any morality at all, let alone the kind of apparently invincible morality that justifies the new atheist intolerance of religion?
John Gray points out that the new atheists defend liberal freedoms without asking where they come from.
Hard atheists like Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre will want to know how atheists can rationally justify their absolute sounding commitment to timeless values without implicitly invoking God.
They would say you cannot.
And Richard Dawkins gets close to hard atheism when he says that in a universe of blind physical forces you won't find any reason or rhyme or any justice.
The universe has the properties that we should expect if there is no design, no purpose, no evil and no good.
DNA neither knows nor cares.
DNA just is and we dance to its music.
But if Hitler or Paul or you and I are simply dancing to our DNA, no one can blame us for anything.
All morality is gone.
So the claim that God is not great, being a moral claim, dissolves into utter meaninglessness.
And here we meet a strange contradiction.
That atheism seems to me ironically to deny the one thing that upholds moral values, that is justice.
For millions, ladies and gentlemen, there is no justice in this life.
And according to atheism, they will never get it after death, since death's the end.
So the terrorists who danced their DNA on the bodies of their victims get away with it.
They will not get away with it, ladies and gentlemen, because here is another aspect of the greatness of God that he is the ultimate judge of mankind.
There is to be a judgment at which justice will be done fairly.
In England at the moment, atheists have paid for an advertising campaign where buses carry a message.
There's probably no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life.
Why is it that atheists associate God with worry?
Is that they fear to meet him as judge?
They don't like judgment but I can't help noticing sometimes how judgmental they are.
German Marxist thinker Max Horkheimer said a very interesting thing.
He feared there might not be a God since then there would be no judgment and no justice.
And here we have a dilemma.
The problem of my human guilt on the one hand and my desire for justice on the other.
I want justice, but what will justice say to me?
And what about God?
Is he really the despot they make him out to be?
No, there's yet more to his greatness.
God is not only the great creator, a judge, he's a God of grace and love.
And the central claim of Christianity is this that as an expression of his love, God himself became human.
The word became flesh.
Christ shows us as none other the greatness of God.
He made unique claims to be the truth, to be the son of God, and backed them up by a life and teaching without parallel.
But his moral teaching was not his main message.
His stated mission was to deal with the moral chasm that separates us humans from God by taking our sins on himself.
Ladies and gentlemen, we scientists cannot even tell you what energy is.
So don't be surprised if I cannot completely explain to you the deepest mystery of our universe's history the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Yet, just as we see the effect of and use energy without completely understanding it, what I do observe is the transformation, the peace, the hope that comes into the lives of ordinary men and women who learn to place their faith, their confidence, their trust in Christ as Savior and God.
I see in them and experience in myself a transcendent sense of purpose that atheism does not have and a hope that atheism does not know.
It is here, ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you that the greatness of God is supremely manifest.
Thank you.
Thanks for watching this episode.
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