(January 14, 2016 at 10:52 pm)athrock Wrote: Either way, he wasn't going to remain an atheist because, as a rational man, he had examined the arguments and concluded that a god exists.
The fact that he chose Christianity suggests that he may have been persuaded by CS Lewis' reasoning in Mere Christianity.
Have you read it?
No, I haven't, but I have read other things in its same genre (Josh McDowell, Gary Habermas, William Lane Craig, etc.), but yes, it's the "3 Ls -- Liar, Lunatic, Lord" crap that we've all heard before. Read for yourself:
http://www.rejesus.co.uk/site/module/fai...cience/P2/
A pro-Jesus site, by the way, but here are some highlights:
Quote:The fact, for instance, that the universe had a beginning (and Big Bang theory calls out for an explanation, because nature has not been observed to create itself) immediately draws the question of how that beginning came to be. At the time of this incredible explosion of matter and energy there must have been something outside nature that was capable of creating. And that ‘something’ sounds like God himself.
When you look at the fine-tuning of the universe – the so-called anthropic principle – where you see how incredibly improbable it is that all of the constants that govern the behaviour of matter and energy were set at exactly the point at which some sort of stable life was possible, you can’t help but marvel and conclude that there was something more than happenstance behind the process to set those constants in just that precise way.
Then there’s the moral law, or ‘law of right behaviour’, which is present in humankind. We might argue about what is right and what is wrong but we all have a sense of right and wrong.
The moral law cannot be readily explained in terms of evolution because it sometimes calls us to do things that are really quite the opposite of what evolution would ask – like jump into a river to save a drowning stranger. The moral law has been fully set in the heart of only one species – humankind. There’s no bigger signpost towards the existence of a personal God.
Why do I see the "hand" of William Lane Craig over all of this? (More on him later.) Francis, you are a geneticist and a damn good one, but that does not make you into a cosmologist, also! Please stop "practicing" physics without a license!! (Or, at least a physics degree!)
Quote:I wasn’t raised in a faith tradition. As a child I was vaguely aware of the concept of God. My parents enrolled me in a church choir to learn music. I took to the music but not to the theology.
And, this Church that Francis attended did not have their own copy of Mere Christianity? Difficult to believe that Francis, a great scientist to be sure, could absorb nothing but music and yet no theology!
Quote:I was convinced that everything in the universe could be explained by equations and physical principles. No thinking scientist, I concluded, could seriously entertain the possibility of God without committing intellectual suicide. I had gone from being an agnostic to an atheist. To me, faith was sentimental superstition. But then I changed direction and went to medical school, and I started to encounter the reality of suffering and death in a much more up-close-and-personal way.
And, so, "Francis cracked?" He was all "pure" while in graduate school, but then, the realities of life began to catch-up with him. What can I say? I sympathize, I really do; I ended-up going down the exact same path that he did. I could not deal with death and human loss, and guess what? "I was born again," at least for awhile. Perhaps the Ivory Towers have a thing or two to teach us here; discussing the existence of god is not something that we do while visiting folks who are in hospice.
Quote:One afternoon an elderly patient with a terminal illness shared her faith with me and explained why this gave her comfort and peace as she saw the end of her life approaching. She turned to me and said: ‘Doctor, I’ve told you about my faith but you haven’t said anything. What do you believe?’
I had never been asked that question so directly. Suddenly I felt a great sense of unease that I didn’t have a good answer, that I had never seriously asked myself the question, that as a scientist I had never taken the time to look at the evidence for and against belief, and had drawn a conclusion without having considered that evidence.
Really, Francis? In all those years of graduate school, no one ever asked you outright, "Do you believe in god?"
Quote:My moment of commitment came one autumn day while I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains. It was a beautiful afternoon and as I rounded a corner I unexpectedly saw a frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high. The remarkable beauty of creation was overwhelming. I could no longer resist. I fell on my knees and asked Christ to be my Saviour. My days of willful blindness towards God were gone. The search was over.
Been there, done that; you seem kind of arrogant though, Francis; a little hubris perhaps? Do scientists ever have an "Ereka" moment that they can point to? Perhaps, perhaps not, but scientific conclusions, especially radical ones, are usually the result of a long process that takes place in the presence of one's peers and not alone.
