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Black Holes, Belief Systems, and Help for the Skeptical Soul

Sarah Salviander grew up watching Star Wars, Star Trek, and Carl Sagan, and by age nine, she knew she would be a space scientist. She also grew up on atheism. When she was young, her atheist parents moved the family from Oregon to British Columbia to live under socialism, and she recalls having met no more than three people who identified as Christian there.

As an undergrad at Eastern Oregon University, though, she encountered more Christians and was astonished to find they were nothing like the caricature she’d always held. They were joyous and content. And they were smart. Moreover, she had physics professors, whom she admired, who were Christian.

Midway through her undergrad years, a research internship with the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences at UC-San Diego awakened her to some remarkable coincidences about the structure of our universe. She writes:

I remember being astounded by this, blown away, completely and utterly awed. It seemed incredible to me that there was a way to find the answer to [questions] we had about the universe. In fact, it seems that every question we have about the universe is answerable. There’s no reason it has to be this way, and it made me think of Einstein’s observation that the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it’s comprehensible. I started to sense an underlying order to the universe.

That same summer, she read The Count of Monte Cristo in her off hours. Film and TV adaptations she’d seen had focused on revenge, but upon reading the original, she was surprised to find:

a philosophically deep examination of forgiveness and God’s role in giving justice. I was surprised by this, and was starting to realize that the concept of God and religion was not as philosophically trivial as I had thought.

Sarah converted to Christianity as a grad student, and not long afterward, a younger student timidly approached her. The student was troubled because one of her professors had said she couldn’t be religious and believe in science. Sarah reassured her that the professor was wrong, and the incident motivated her to help others who may struggle with questions about science and faith.

In The Story of the Cosmos: How the Heavens Declare the Glory of God, she draws some intriguing analogies between belief in black holes and belief in God. The science of black holes began in the early twentieth century, but it wasn’t until 2019 that scientists actually captured an image of one. Over the intervening years, various researchers exhibited either optimism or doubt about the reality of the as-yet-unseen object until, by the 1990s, the evidence had mounted sufficiently that the existence of black holes was generally accepted, albeit begrudgingly in some cases.

What does belief in black holes have to do with God? She writes:

The black hole epic shows that people have an especially difficult time with anything that is vast, strange, and invisible. It’s normal to want the emotional comfort of dealing with what is touchable, visible, familiar, and safe. But this need leads to an attitude that is a significant part of atheistic thinking and has caused science a lot of trouble: “If I can’t see it or touch it, it doesn’t exist, and I don’t have to think about it.”

Scientists had indirect evidence for the reality of black holes long before they had direct, visible evidence. They could see a black hole’s effects on the behavior of light in its vicinity. Plus they had the math. But some fell prey to barriers to understanding that we all can be susceptible to. She lists four: limited perspective, misleading emotions, intellectual inertia, and excessive pride. Noted physicists Arthur Eddington and J. Robert Oppenheimer, for example, each for his own reasons, couldn’t accept the reality of what the evidence to date clearly indicated and gave up on the endeavor.

In a similar way, we all have indirect evidence for God. We have an exquisitely beautiful and complex universe that, as scientists also begrudgingly had to accept in the twentieth century, is not self-existing and eternal but rather had a beginning, which implies a Beginner. We have other realities that we can’t see or touch, such as conscience and conscious awareness of a moral law, both of which imply a moral lawgiver. There’s more, but you probably get the picture.

It doesn’t follow that “if I can’t see it or touch it, it doesn’t exist,” but it might follow that “If I pretend it doesn’t exist, I don’t have to think about it.”  She draws a final analogy:

Those who don’t want to believe in God are skeptical for many of the same reasons scientists didn’t want to believe in black holes – the idea is just too big and unnerving to deal with.

They can ignore the indirect evidence if they chose, but they are not rational when they do so. Instead, she says, they end up corrupting science itself. And using it as a means to find evidence for what they already believe.

Keep that in mind the next time you hear someone say, “Science says …”


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More than Stardust: How to Debunk Scientific Materialism for Your Kids

A few weeks ago, I introduced IFI readers to Science Uprising, a project of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture that aims to (among other things) help people living in a secular culture learn to separate out legitimate claims of science from philosophical claims made under the guise of science. For a quick recap, philosophical materialism is the belief that matter and energy is all that exists. Best captured in Carl Sagan’s famous pronouncement that “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be,” it is a belief about the nature of reality.

But materialism is not a scientific belief. It is a philosophical presupposition that many people associate with the practice of science. In some circles it’s actually called scientific materialism, as if the two are inextricably connected. But there is nothing that says they necessarily go together (except perhaps for certain atheist-materialists who insist that they do).

To be sure, there are some very smart practical materialists who work in the natural sciences, but we are under no obligation to submit to their materialistic impositions on our thinking about the natural world. You don’t have to have a Ph.D. to spot materialistic claims being put forth in the guise of science, and here’s an example of how you can start to train your children in worldview thinking and inoculate them against such philosophical sleights of hand.

You Are Stardust is a whimsical children’s book that encourages children to feel good about themselves because they and we are all part of nature. The title refers to the scientific belief that the atoms that make up our bodies were forged in the stars. Now, it is true that most scientists believe the elements that comprise the earth and our bodies were, indeed, originally forged in stars, so I wouldn’t take issue with that. The point I would draw out of You Are Stardust is that author Elin Kelsey has nothing more to offer us as grounds for feeling good about ourselves.

Nature is a wonder, yes, and the fact that we are a part of it is a marvel as well. But is that it? Is that all we have to latch onto as a reason to feel good about ourselves? Well, if materialism is true, then yes, it is.

Here’s what I would recommend. Get a copy of You Are Stardust and also get a copy of You Are Special, by Max Lucado. Both of these books are written for children ages four and up. Get You Are Stardust from your library if you don’t want to buy it, but I would suggest buying You Are Special. It’s worth reading over and over again, and in fact is not just for children but has a powerful message for adults as well.

In a nutshell, You Are Special is the story of Punchinello, a misfit wooden person who feels like an outsider and a loser until he learns he can find his worth by going to visit Eli every day. Eli is the maker of all the wooden people who lives up on the hill overlooking the village. Before Punchinello leaves Eli’s workshop after his first visit, Eli lifts him up so they’re looking eye to eye and says, “What I think [about you] is more important than what [the other wooden people] think. … you are special because I made you. And I don’t make mistakes.”

How’s that for a reason to feel special?

Read both of these books to your child, preferably in one sitting (if you don’t have children at home, read them for yourself), and let the contrast of worldviews serve as a backdrop for follow-up conversations. Of course, you know your children and how best to engage them, but here are some questions to spark your thinking:

  • Who is Eli?
  • Why is Punchinello sad?
  • What makes Punchinello special?
  • If you and I are stardust, what makes the stars special?
  • Nature is beautiful, but does nature love us? Does it know us? Can we have a relationship with it? Does it love us?

The main point I hope you’ll take from this is that we can engage with the works of materialists head on. Rather than avoid them, we can learn to spot materialist assumptions lying behind their claims about the world, draw them out, and interrogate them. From there, we can engage in a kind of compare and contrast analysis between a picture of the world from the perspective of philosophical materialism, on the one hand, and one from the perspective of Judeo-Christian theism, on the other. Which one is more satisfying? Which one resonates with certain things we know to be true about the world? Which one better “fits” reality as we know it and live it? Hopefully, questions like these will spark ongoing, meaningful conversations with your children about the ideas that are already competing for their allegiance in the culture.

Being stardust may be cool but being stardust and being known and loved by your maker is profound. Even a four-year-old can grasp the difference between being just “a part of nature” and being known and loved by the maker of nature and the stars.



Early Bird Special Expires Soon!
We are looking forward to welcoming Rev. Franklin Graham to our annual fall banquet on November 1st to share his faith, concerns about the secular culture and his vision for our country. Don’t delay in getting your tickets, as our early bird special expires on Sept. 2nd!

Learn more HERE.




A Thinking People’s Revolt

Science Uprising Pulls back the Curtain on Pseudo-Scientific Posturing

In the 1980s, Madonna captured the image of one girl’s shallow, self-absorbed life with her pop song, “Material Girl”:

You know that we are living in a material world
And I am a material girl.

The era’s personal materialism of “I like stuff” or “Stuff is all that matters” was also captured in TV teen Alex Keaton of the sitcom Family Ties. Individuals may not be so enamored today of material things, but there’s another kind of collective materialism that holds undue sway in our culture. I’m talking about “materialism” as a philosophy.

Materialism as a philosophy is simply the idea that the material world is all there is. Put differently, materialism is the belief that matter and energy, interacting according to the laws of chemistry and physics, constitute the sum total of reality. Philosophical materialism, then, is a belief about the nature of reality.

Sometimes, we hear it stated overtly, such as when celebrity scientist Carl Sagan intoned, “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” Most often, though, it’s subtle. It is assumed but not stated. This is especially true in the realms of the natural sciences. Consider, for example, the children’s book You Are Stardust, which encourages young children to feel good about themselves because the atoms that make up their bodies were forged in the stars. Author Elin Kelsey doesn’t come right out and say, “There is no God” or “The universe is all that exists.” She has simply assumed that materialism is the truth about reality, and then written a whimsical children’s book from that philosophical perspective.

Today, philosophical materialism is almost universally conflated with science. You Are Stardust is categorized as a (what else?) science-based picture book for children. We can also discern this conflation behind statements like, “I don’t believe in God; I believe in science,” as if theistic belief and science are inherently incompatible. But they’re not incompatible, and despite what celebrity scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye the Science Guy might say, there’s nothing that says materialism and science necessarily go together.

So, the question thinking people should be asking is, Why should materialism enjoy such a privileged, unquestioned position in our culture? And the answer is, it shouldn’t.

Enter Science Uprising, a project of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Science Uprising burst onto the scene this past summer with a series of short, edgy videos challenging this materialistic metanarrative on the ground it’s been squatting on for far too long: the natural sciences. The first episode sets things up by explaining what materialism is, demonstrating how its pretensions have become deeply embedded in our culture, and showing how it actually runs counter to many aspects of life we all believe to be true and value. Subsequent episodes look at neuroscience and the reality of the mind, DNA and the reality of coded information in the cell, evolutionary biology and the failure of the neo-Darwinian hypothesis, and more. The upshot of it all is that philosophical materialism fails to adequately explain reality as we know it and live it. Moreover, it fails when put to empirical tests.

How do such concepts as love, compassion, justice and the human soul fit into a narrative that says only matter and energy are real? They don’t. And this should be our first tipoff that maybe materialism isn’t the whole truth about reality. No one–not even materialists themselves–actually lives as if materialism is true.

You don’t have to be a working scientist to think for yourself about science. Research shows that a big reason young people are abandoning Christianity in droves is because they’ve been told it’s incompatible with science, when the truth is, it’s materialism that is incompatible with both Christianity and science. We are instructed in Scripture to “demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God” (2 Corinthians 10:5), and if ever there were a lofty pretension lifting itself up against theistic belief, then materialism should be crowned as king of the whoppers.

Thankfully, the consumeristic materialism of the 1980s has less appeal to youth today. The task for today is to pull back the curtain on this whopper of a lie about reality, an idol of the mind that is even more destructive to the soul. So, check out Science Uprising here, and let the demolishing begin.


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Bill Nye’s Reasonable Man — The Central Worldview Clash of the Ham-Nye Debate

Last night’s debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham attracted a huge international audience and no shortage of controversy—even before it began. Bill Nye, whose main media presence is as “The Science Guy,” and Ken Ham, co-founder of Answers in Genesis and founder of the Creation Museum, squared off in a true debate over one of the most important questions that the human mind can contemplate. That is no small achievement.

I enjoyed a front row seat at the debate, which took place even as a major winter storm raged outside, dumping considerable amounts of snow and ice and causing what the local police announced as a “Class Two” weather emergency. Inside the Creation Museum there was quite enough heat, and the debate took place without a hitch. Thankfully, it also took place without acrimony.

The initial controversy about the debate centered in criticism of Bill Nye for even accepting the invitation. Many evolutionary scientists, such as Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, refuse to debate the issue, believing that any public debate offers legitimacy to those who deny evolution. Nye was criticized by many leading evolutionists, who argued publicly that nothing good could come of the debate.

Interestingly, this points back to the famous debates over evolution that took place in nineteenth century England, when Anglican churchmen faced early evolutionary scientists in (mostly) civil public exchanges. Back then, it was the churchmen who were criticized by their peers for participation in the debate. Now, the table has turned, indicating something of the distance between the intellectual conditions then and now.

Of course, Bill Nye might have felt some moral obligation to debate the question, since he had launched a unilateral attack on creationist parents in a video that went viral last year. In that video, Nye told creationist parents:

[I]f you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that’s fine, but don’t make your kids do it because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can—we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems.”

But if Nye had launched the attack, he did not arrive at the debate in a defensive mode. A protege of the late Carl Sagan and the current CEO of the Planetary Society, Nye was in full form last night, wearing his customary bow-tie, and immaculately dressed in a very expensive suit. He took notes with a very fine writing instrument. I like his style.

Ken Ham is a veteran debater on the issue of origins, and he was clearly prepared for the debate. Ham’s arguments were tight and focused, and his demeanor was uniformly calm and professional. The format allowed for a full expression of both arguments, along with spirited exchanges and questions submitted from the audience. What the 150 minute event lacked was any requirement that the debaters answer each other’s questions. That would have changed the way the debate concluded.

The central question of the debate was this: “Is creation a viable model of origins in today’s modern scientific era?” Ham stuck to the question tenaciously. Nye, on the other hand, tried to personalize the debate and kept changing the question from creation to “Ken Ham’s creationism.” Ham was unfazed, and kept to his argument.

As the debate began, it was clear that Ham and Nye do not even agree on definitions. The most friction on definition came when Nye rejected Ham’s distinction between “historical science” and “observational science” out of hand. Nye maintained his argument that science is a unitary method, without any distinction between historical and observational modes. Ham pressed his case that science cannot begin without making certain assumptions about the past, which cannot be observed. Furthermore, Ham rightly insisted that observational science generally does not require any specific commitment to a model of historical science. In other words, both evolutionists and creationists do similar experimental science, and sometimes even side-by-side.

Nye’s main presentation contained a clear rejection of biblical Christianity. At several points in the debate, he dismissed the Bible’s account of Noah and the ark as unbelievable. Oddly, he even made this a major point in his most lengthy argument. As any informed observer would have anticipated, Nye based his argument on the modern consensus and went to the customary lines of evidence, from fossils to ice rods. Ham argued back with fossil and geological arguments of his own. Those portions of the debate did not advance the arguments much past where they were left in the late nineteenth century, with both sides attempting to keep score by rocks and fossils.

In this light, the debate proved both sides right on one central point: If you agreed with Bill Nye you would agree with his reading of the evidence. The same was equally true for those who entered the room agreeing with Ken Ham; they would agree with his interpretation of the evidence.

That’s because the argument was never really about ice rods and sediment layers. It was about the most basic of all intellectual presuppositions: How do we know anything at all? On what basis do we grant intellectual authority? Is the universe self-contained and self-explanatory? Is there a Creator, and can we know him?

On those questions, Ham and Nye were separated by infinite intellectual space. They shared the stage, but they do not live in the same intellectual world. Nye is truly committed to a materialistic and naturalistic worldview. Ham is an evangelical Christian committed to the authority of the Bible. The clash of ultimate worldview questions was vividly displayed for all to see.

When asked how matter came to exist and how consciousness arose, Nye responded simply and honestly: “I don’t know.” Responding to the same questions, Ham went straight to the Bible, pointing to the Genesis narrative as a full and singular answer to these questions. Nye went on the attack whenever Ham cited the Bible, referring to the implausibility of believing what he kept describing as “Ken Ham’s interpretation of a 3,000 year old book translated into American English.”

To Bill Nye, the idea of divine revelation is apparently nonsensical. He ridiculed the very idea.

This is where the debate was most important. Both men were asked if any evidence could ever force them to change their basic understanding. Both men said no. Neither was willing to allow for any dispositive evidence to change their minds. Both operate in basically closed intellectual systems. The main problem is that Ken Ham knows this to be the case, but Bill Nye apparently does not. Ham was consistently bold in citing his confidence in God, in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and in the full authority and divine inspiration of the Bible. He never pulled a punch or hid behind an argument. Nye seems to believe that he is genuinely open to any and all new information, but it is clear that his ultimate intellectual authority is the prevailing scientific consensus. More than once he asserted a virtually unblemished confidence in the ability of modern science to correct itself. He steadfastly refused to admit that any intellectual presuppositions color his own judgment.

But the single most defining moments in the debate came as Bill Nye repeatedly cited the “reasonable man” argument in his presentation and responses. He cited Adolphe Quetelet’s famed l’homme moyen—“a reasonable man”—as the measure of his intellectual authority. Writing in 1835, Quetelet, a French intellectual, made his “reasonable man” famous. The “reasonable man” is a man of intellect and education and knowledge who can judge evidence and arguments and function as an intellectual authority on his own two feet. The “reasonable man” is a truly modern man. Very quickly, jurists seized on the “reasonable man” to define the law and lawyers used him to make arguments before juries. A “reasonable man” would interpret the evidence and make a reasoned judgment, free from intellectual pressure.

Bill Nye repeatedly cited the reasonable man in making his arguments. He is a firm believer in autonomous human reason and the ability of the human intellect to solve the great problems of existence without any need of divine revelation. He spoke of modern science revealing “what we all can know” as it operates on the basis of natural laws. As Nye sees it, Ken Ham has a worldview, but Nye does not. He referred to “Ken Ham’s worldview,” but claimed that science merely provides knowledge. He sees himself as the quintessential “reasonable man,” and he repeatedly dismissed Christian arguments as “not reasonable.”

In an unexpected turn, near the end of the event, Nye even turned to make an argument against Christianity on grounds of theodicy. He asked Ham if it was “reasonable” to believe that God had privileged a personal revelation that was not equally accessible to all. Nye’s weakest argument had to do with his claim—made twice—that billions of religious people accept modern science. He provided a chart that included vast millions of adherents of other world religions and announced that they are religious but accept modern science. That is nonsense, of course. At least it is nonsense if he meant to suggest that these billions believe in evolution. That is hardly the case. Later, he lowered his argument to assert that these billions of people use modern technology. So, of course, do creationists. There are few facilities in the world more high-tech than the Creation Museum.

Nye is clearly not a fan of theistic evolution, since he argued that a purely natural argument should be quite enough for the “reasonable man.” He seemed to affirm a methodological agnosticism, since he sees the question of a “higher power” or “spiritual being” to be one of little intellectual consequence. He did argue that nature is a closed system and that natural selection can allow for absolutely no supernatural interference or influence. In this respect, he sounded much like Stephen Hawking, who has argued that God may exist, but that there is nothing for him to do.

Ken Ham is a Young Earth Creationist (as am I), but the larger argument was over worldviews, and the debate revealed the direct collision between evolution and the recognition of any historical authority within Genesis 1-11. As if to make that clear, in making one of his closing arguments, Bill Nye actually went back to cite “this problem of the ark.”

The ark is not the real problem; autonomous human reason is. Bill Nye is a true believer in human reason and the ability of modern science to deliver us. Humanity is just “one germ away” from extinction, he said. But science provides him with the joy of discovery and understanding.

The problem with autonomous human reason is made clear by the Apostle Paul in Romans chapter 1:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things” (Rom 1:18-23 ESV).

The problem with human reason is that it, along with every other aspect of our humanity, was corrupted by the fall. This is what theologians refer to as the “noetic effects of the fall.” We have not lost the ability to know all things, but we have lost the ability to know them on our own authority and power. We are completely dependent upon divine revelation for the answers to the most important questions of life. Our sin keeps us from seeing what is right before our eyes in nature. We are dependent upon the God who loves us enough to reveal himself to us—and to give us his Word.

As it turns out, the reality and authority of divine revelation, more than any other issue, was what the debate last night was all about. As the closing statements made very clear, Ken Ham understood that fact, but Bill Nye did not.

The central issue last night was really not the age of the earth or the claims of modern science. The question was not really about the ark or sediment layers or fossils. It was about the central worldview clash of our times, and of any time: the clash between the worldview of the self-declared “reasonable man” and the worldview of the sinner saved by grace.


This article was originally posted at the AlbertMohler.com blog.