Peter Duran waves his hand and dismisses my evidences for the existence of God by associating belief in creation with numerology and astrology, which require “tactics” designed to persuade the “unwary reader.”
Mr. Duran dismisses creationists as mythologists, yet there are many brilliant and distinguished scientists today and in centuries past who passionately believed in a Creator. I suppose Mr. Duran would also dismiss men like Blaise Pascal, Johannes Kepler, Michael Faraday, Fritz Schaefer and hundreds of others, as mythologists.
Mr. Duran responded to six claims I made, as a representative sample of my “missteps and erroneous claims.” In the interest of brevity I shall use the same approach and respond here to three of his rebuttals. I shall try to fairly represent Mr. Duran’s position.
Claim 1 : My claim is that the law of causality says that anything that has a beginning requires a beginner. The universe had a beginning, thus the universe had a beginner. I think this is a fair argument.
Mr. Duran’s response is basically two-fold. First he says that, “it may be argued that the universe has always existed in various states and, hence, doesn’t require a creator.” Well, sure, “it may be argued” that the moon is made of green cheese but if one doesn’t have any evidence for it, I don’t really think it is worth bringing up.
Correct me if I am wrong but I believe virtually the entire scientific community believes the evidence is overwhelming for a universe that began about 17 billion years ago.
Secondly, Mr. Duran then claims if the universe needs a cause, God would need a cause. But Mr. Duran has already answered this question by pointing out that if the universe were eternal, it would not need a beginner. If Mr. Duran can show evidence that God began to exist at a particular moment in time, then I will agree that God needs a cause.
Claim 3 : My claim is that science tells us that life can only come from life and life from the primordial soup has been shown to be essentially impossible. Mr. Duran claims that life must come from life at a macro level but not at a micro level because there is Intelligent Design being done on Nova showing how that is possible. Oh, and they hope to have it “figured out in 10 or 20 years.” I don’t think this argument even needs a rebuttal.
Claim 6 : My claim is that the Bible makes observations that only God could know, like the original state of the earth being dark and covered with water. Mr. Duran cites examples of the Bible not being trustworthy because it is filled with errors and contradictions. One example he gives is that pi does not equal 3 as the Bible claims. Well, pi actually does equal 3 depending on the precision level. He could argue the Bible to be in error no matter how precise a measurement for pi was used.
He also cites claims about the impossibility of the ark holding enough animals. There are multiple possibilities for this. Mine happens to be that the ark only had to hold species from the Mesopotamian region; there are other possibilities.
He also takes the Da Vinci Code approach that the Bible was pretty much patched together by people with an agenda when the King James Version was developed, but Mr. Duran is even more radical than Dan Brown. At least Dan Brown takes his claim back to the 4th century rather than the 17th century. Mr. Duran conveniently ignores the fact that modern translations are based on 1700-year-old Greek manuscripts, not the King James Bible.
Suffice it to say that through textual criticism, manuscript evidence, and internal and external documentary evidence, one thing Christians can be confident of is that the New Testament we have today was written by eyewitnesses who told the truth and that what they wrote is 99.5 percent accurately preserved in today’s versions. The original Biblical documents had exactly zero errors and contradictions and we have trustworthy copies of those documents. Among many others, there are many brilliant and distinguished scientists who know this to be true.
And that is not numerology, astrology or mythology.
Why would someone even propose these kinds of arguments? When one has an irrational commitment to naturalist explanations for supernatural events, it is only to be expected.
Pepper Adams
Peachtree City, Ga.