Atheism is Based on a Mathematical Impossibility
DNA shows it takes more faith to be an atheist than to believe in a creator
I often hear people say, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Well guess what, it would appear that God has graciously provided extraordinary evidence for his existence, through our modern scientific understanding of DNA. But before we get to the evidence itself, it’s important to understand the limitations of evidence. As an engineering student I had decided that God did not exist, but then my life was transformed by an encounter with Christ. That was over 40 years ago and my relationship with God has been growing ever since. I’m an engineer so facts, evidence and truth are important to me. But working with psychologists for many years helped me to see that people can look at the same evidence differently due to the psychological phenomenon of “Confirmation Bias”. Confirmation Bias, is the tendency of all human beings to freely accept evidence that supports their existing beliefs, but to challenge and ignore evidence that contradicts their existing beliefs. You suffer from it, and I suffer from it; the best we can do is be aware of it and be careful to not dismiss evidence contrary to our beliefs too quickly.
So, evidence, facts and reason are very important, but they have their limitations because of this human weakness. The Bible is very realistic about this, for example John 12:37 says:
“Even after Jesus had performed so many signs [miracles] in their presence, they still would not believe in him.”
In my opinion, very few people have the intellectual rigor or integrity to be completely objective about evidence, but one person who came close in my view was Antony Flew. He wrote a book, “There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind”. I found it an interesting read. What impressed me about Flew, was that he seemed to be a person completely committed to following the evidence, wherever it may go. When the weight of scientific evidence changed, he changed his mind and the scientific evidence that changed was our understanding of DNA.
John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics at Oxford, has debated many leading atheists, including Richard Dawkins. He has also written about the scientific evidence for God, including the evidence that comes from our understanding of DNA. In his book, “God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?”, he goes into great detail about the biological machinery, and mathematics, involved in making and reading DNA/RNA. The following is a series of quotes from his book:
“What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, warm breath, nor a “spark of life”. It is information, words, instructions…” (Richard Dawkins)
“We now talk quite happily about a living cell as an information processing machine since that is precisely what it is. This is an exciting intellectual development because it means that the nature of biological information can be explored using concepts and results from information theory… the human genome is over 3.5 billion letters long.”
“We remind the reader of Dawkin’s unequivocal conclusion: ‘It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn’t work’. Sir Fred Hoyle and astrophysicist Chandra Wickramasinghe share Dawkins’ view — on the capabilities of pure chance processes, that is, ‘No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have had a random beginning. Troops of monkeys thundering away at random on typewriters could not produce the works of Shakespeare, for the practical reason that the whole observable universe is not large enough to contain the necessary monkey hordes… The same is true of living material. The likelihood of the spontaneous formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it… and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.’”
This is an astounding improbability! To put “a number with 40,000 noughts after it” in context, it is estimated that the number of atoms in the observable universe is only a number with 80 noughts after it, a tiny number in comparison. As an engineer, this says to me that the atheistic worldview is based on a mathematical impossibility. Don’t ever let an atheist tell you that they don’t believe in miracles, because the mathematics shows that if they believe that the molecules essential for life arose through purely naturalistic processes, they do.
If you are an atheist, your confirmation bias may be screaming at you to ignore this evidence, but I hope you will research it for yourself. If you come across a good answer to this impossibility, I’d be interested to hear it.
If you are an agnostic, has mathematics given you a good reason to get off the fence?
This unimaginable mathematical improbability is only one of a number of difficulties that is causing a growing number of scientists to describe evolution as a theory in crisis. You might be interested to watch “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis — Peter Saunders interviews John Lennox”
