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Like Nothing You’ve Seen Before: Big Bang Errors and God Errors

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Filed under Cosmology

NOTE: Today we share a guest post on cosmology from one of our top non-theistic commenters, Paul Rimmer. Tomorrow, we'll post a response from Fr. Andrew Pinsent, Research Director at Oxford University's Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion.     First things First   Many articles about God and cosmology begin with ignorance, and this article will be no different. I'm not a cosmologist. My research involves much of the same mathematical formalism cosmologists use, and... Read More

How Contemporary Physics Points to God

Does modern physics provide evidence for the existence of God? This article presents a general overview of the answer to that question (a more thorough treatment may be found in my recent book, New Proofs for the Existence of God). I will divide the topic into three parts: 1. Can Science Give Evidence of Creation and Supernatural Design? 2. What is the Evidence for a Beginning and What are the Implications for Creation? 3. What is the Evidence of Supernatural Intelligence from Anthropic... Read More

When Something Becomes Nothing

NOTE: Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his own blog, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.     A friend recently asked me to comment on this little video from New Scientist, which summarizes some of the claims made in an article from the July 23 issue on the theme “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The magazine has been sitting on my gargantuan “to read” stack... Read More

Would God Create a Gigantic Universe?

Some critics claim that if God existed, then the universe would not be 13.7 billion years old or be 93 billion light years across as it is currently. Hasn’t science shown that this immense universe was not created for us but that we are an inconsequential part of an uncreated universe? The problem with this argument is that science can show us only the universe’s dimensions; it cannot reveal any meaning or lack of meaning inherent in those dimensions. In response to this argument,... Read More

The Deflation of Inflationary Theory

If you study the history of science long enough, you realize that you've got to ask two questions about any scientific theory, especially the biggest and most grand of them. What is it? Why was it put forth? The two almost invariably go together. We cannot truly grasp what the theory is, until we understand the motives of those who developed it. Now here the obvious objection would be this. The what of a theory is really the only question, because the why is so obvious as not to... Read More

Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s Inadvertent Proof for God

Stephen Hawking

There's an old saying about giving a man enough rope, and he'll hang himself. The idea is that if someone is wrong or lying, the longer they go on, the more obvious this becomes.  Well, Bantam Books gave Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow all the rope they wanted, and the result is The Grand Design, a new book in which they argue against the necessity (and existence) of God.  Here's the core of their argument:   “[Just] as Darwin and Wallace explained how the apparently miraculous... Read More

Does the Cosmic Census Bolster Atheists’ Claims?

The galactic census data is in! According to an Associated Press article released recently: “Scientists have estimated the first cosmic census of planets in our galaxy and the numbers are astronomical: at least 50 billion planets in the Milky Way.” When I would hear that kind of thing when I was an atheist, I’d muster up my most condescending facial expression and turn to the nearest believer to say: “You still believe all that Bible stuff now?” To my way of thinking back then,... Read More

Why Does the World Exist?

John Updike

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. — Oscar Wilde Recently, I was driving with two of my brothers from New England to New York, and we all got to talking about religion. One gladly played up his own skepticism: isn't it suspicious, he said, that every faith claims to be the "one true church"? Wasn't this mentality ("OTC" we call it now) the stuff of gangs, clubs, and nation states, the same myopic "us vs. them" mentality one sees everywhere in the world,... Read More

What Is the Difference Between Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design?

What's the difference between creation, evolution, and intelligent design?   Creationism, Evolutionism, and Intelligent Design are three of the major positions on the question of how we got here. What’s the difference between these positions? That seemingly straightforward question proves surprisingly controversial. Let’s take a look at it . . .   The Basic Question The basic question at issue in the contemporary origins debate is whether or not the world was created. It could... Read More

Fraught With Purpose

Quarks

When something stops working, our first reaction is often to find someone who knows how to fix it. Whether it’s a car, a computer, or a toaster, most of us aren’t inclined to try and tinker around with some machine that we are just as likely to make worse as better. We are all pretty good at telling when something isn’t working right, but it’s far more difficult to discern why. Clearly this piece of technology is designed to do some useful task, and when it stops doing that task,... Read More

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