I’ve been think­ing a lit­tle bit about why I am con­vinced of the truth of Chris­tian­ity a lit­tle since Mark Driscoll’s Jesus based apolo­getic made me ques­tion the way I approach “the­ism”, and Dave’s though­ful series on athe­ism con­cluded with Jesus as a foun­da­tional rea­son for reject­ing athe­ism and adopt­ing Chris­tian­ity (not the­ism). I tried my hand at defend­ing Chris­t­ian belief on the basis of the his­toric­ity of Jesus and the verac­ity of claims made about him in the Bible here.

I’ve been think­ing that while my adher­ence to Chris­tian­ity as an accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a monothe­is­tic God hinge on Jesus and his claims — there are other rea­son­able rea­sons to believe in a God who cre­ates and sus­tains the universe.

The Fine Tuned Uni­verse argu­ment, the idea that con­di­tions in the uni­verse are extra­or­di­nar­ily bal­anced and com­plex, has its detrac­tors. It has its sci­en­tific expla­na­tions — like the anthropic prin­ci­ple (that things could only be this way for life to exist — ie that life couldn’t pos­si­bly have hap­pened in any other way). And it has its Chris­t­ian pro­po­nents — like William Lane Craig.

I find it pretty com­pelling. Athe­ists using a frame work of nat­u­ral­ism find it mind blow­ing but explain­able. And once they have an expla­na­tion they don’t need a cause. Because to add a cre­ator to the mix would cre­ate some­thing else that needs a cre­ator. I think it’s an odd para­dox that none of their equa­tions of chance — includ­ing the whole mul­ti­verse con­cept — ever fac­tor in a uni­verse with an omnipo­tent God. Surely if mul­ti­ple uni­verses exist then each one has a prob­a­bil­ity of devel­op­ing a God pow­er­ful enough to destroy all the other uni­verses? Monothe­ism is the nat­ural out­come of this school of thought.

On a side note — I want to ask Dawkins or any evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist a ques­tion. Given infi­nite time will humans even­tu­ally evolve into shapeshift­ing aliens? That would seem, based on Trans­form­ers, to be the evo­lu­tion­ary pinnacle.

I’m happy to accept much of the sci­ence of evo­lu­tion. But I won­der what hap­pens when you do that and remove God from the pic­ture. What does the end point look like? How long before we can fly?

The quote below is the rea­son for this post. And it seems par­tic­u­larly dumb. To me the idea that there are a lot of things in the uni­verse that can kill us, and want to, is a case for an inter­ven­ing cre­ator, not a case against…

I want to do a fast tirade on stu­pid design. Look at all the things that just want to kill us…
Most places in the uni­verse will kill life instantly – instantly! Peo­ple say that the forces of nature are just right for life. Excuse me? Look at the vol­ume of the uni­verse where you can’t live. You will die instantly. That’s not what I call the gar­den of Eden.
…
This is all stu­pid design. If you look for what it intel­li­gent, yeah you can find things that are really beau­ti­ful and clever – like the ball socket of the shoul­der – there are a lot of things you can point to. But then you stop look­ing at all the things that con­found that rev­e­la­tion. So if I came across a frozen water­fall and it just struck me for all its beauty, I would then turn over the rock and try to find a mil­li­pede or some kind of deadly newt, put that in con­text, and real­ize of course that the uni­verse is not here for us – for any sin­gu­lar purpose.

So now nature is not right for life which makes life less prob­a­ble, not more, and the athe­ists embrace it. I would have thought the greater the improb­a­bil­ity of life the greater the case for God. Am I miss­ing some­thing? The fact that bad stuff hap­pens nat­u­rally — and that there are things out there that can kill us fits with Chris­t­ian doc­trine rather than con­tra­dict­ing it…

I love the part of the quote that equates the con­cept of Eden — a safe haven — with the whole uni­verse. It’s just dumb.

These argu­ments come from this video — and I found them here. Be warned — this video con­tains a frame depict­ing abnor­mal and aborted fetuses.

Even with­out the specifics of Jesus I find the argu­ment for a cre­ator much more com­pelling than a nat­u­ral­is­tic under­stand­ing of things.

Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He is currently a student at the Queensland Theological College. In a previous professional life he worked in public relations for an economic development and tourism marketing organisation. He is married to Robyn. He likes coffee and the internet.

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