Bear No Burden that Doesn't Belong to You

“The fool says in her heart “There is no God.” -- Psalm 14:1

Several brute facts demand an explanation.  First, our universe, all matter and energy, space and time, came into existence out of absolute nothingness in the Big Bang.  Where could this all possibly have come from?  The second fact is that the Big Bang was not a chaotic beginning, but an extremely finely-tuned one.  That our cosmos continues existing to this very day, and that we earthlings are here to observe and comment on it, is an extremely improbable reality.  The natural odds are that this explosion should have either very quickly collapsed back onto itself in utter, useless, chaos, or dissipated so completely that there would be no matter at all.  Yet the fact of the matter is, the degree of precision required for our habitable universe (where humans are able to live) did indeed prevail.  We are speaking of a high level of precision across a whole range of parameters.  Some have illustrated this reality through the analogy of an electronic control box containing numerous dials on its face.  Every dial is required to be precisely set in order to achieve its expected goal.  Even one miss-set knob will nullify the entire necessary outcome.  On an imaginary box called “Make a Universe,” the analogy continues, are numerous dials variously labeled, “correct total mass,” “rate of expansion,” “strength of the strong nuclear force (inside the atom),” “strength of the weak nuclear force (inside the atom),” “electro-magnetic strength,” “strength of gravity,” “speed of light,” and so-on and so-on.  Should any one of these dials have been set different than they actually were, by even the slightest amount, we would not be here doing what we do today.  And I have only begun to unpack the extremely complex reality of the creation of the universe.  It should also be noted that nothing I have said so far is controversial within the scientific community.  The data is all observable, measurable, and almost unanimously agreed upon.  This is not speculation, but the conclusion of repeated (indeed repeatable) public scientific analysis.

When Christians who pay attention to these matters consider the facts, we judge that they lead to but one conclusion.  The brute facts of cosmology point to the existence of the God of the Bible.  Psalm 19:1 states, and rightly so, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament proclaims His handiwork.”  Now to our belief in “God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,” skeptics will typically reply with the following rejoinders: “Prove the existence of your silly god!  You can’t!  We decry your superstitious beliefs in a non-existent god, and will, for our part, take the intellectual high road of science and reason instead.”  Their working premise, whether stated outright or not, is that belief in a supernatural creator is superstition, while narrowing one’s focus to scientific facts alone is the mark of a rational thinker.  Now in actual fact, Christianity has no issue whatsoever with either facts or reason.  Christian faith never pits itself against either of these.  Nevertheless the public perception is that belief in God loses the debate under the bar of science and reason.

This is no time for Christians to be on the defense on these matters.  Our proper response is to turn their challenges right back onto them.  The facts of science, simply put, say that the universe began out of nothing, and that it did so with the kind of precision that mindless nature could never muster.  That demands an explanation, including from them.  It is not rationally valid for “skeptics,” as they so call themselves, to resist faith in God until Christians provide proof.  At the present moment they too are exercising faith in a position that is currently utterly without foundation.  The burden is on them, not us, to account for the above truths.  

Interestingly, Antony Flew, one-time leader and spokesman for atheism, earlier in his life published an essay titled “The Presumption of Atheism.” He there argued that the burden of proof is rightly shouldered on the believer in God.  However, about a decade ago Dr. Flew changed his mind, renounced his atheism, and came to believe in God.  In his recent autobiography titled, “There Is a God,” in which he described the intellectual details of his conversion, he wrote that the two most influential factors leading to his new position included intelligent design and Big Bang cosmology.  As for the latter, Flew stated that the reality Big Bang beginning of the universe has now overthrown the premise of his earlier essay, and that the burden of proof is no longer on the believer in God, but the atheist.