Why science has not buried God Ravi Zacharias
Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias

Stanely Mushava Literature Today
Kendrick Lamar threatens to gather world religions into one church service and rap logic into their heads but Ravi Zacharias has already beaten him to it. The highly regarded Christian philosopher’s defining opus, “Jesus Among Other Gods”, parsed the pantheon of world religions for intellectual certitude. In “Jesus Among Secular Gods”, which dropped in January this year, Zacharias and Vince Vitale test the counter-cultural claims of Christianity against secular ideologies.

The Christian apologists carry on a bare-knuckle showdown with secular worldviews, principally atheism, scientism, humanism, pluralism and hedonism in eight chapters.

This book comes at a time religion is in decline in the global north, wrapped in the flames of individualism and materialism, while the polemical assault on God inaugurated by Richard Dawkins a decade ago continues full tilt.

The tendency to stack up the alleged atrocities and shortfalls of religion on the same charge sheet for a mass verdict, routinely on display in these polemical tropes of the new atheists, fails to account for divergence within religion.

Zacharias paints to the fundamental difference with the example of a man from a Muslim-majority country who requests to be shown the difference between the Christian God and the Muslim God.

The question is settled for him with the suggestion that he read the life of Jesus to see what the Christian God is like and the life of Muhammad to see what the Muslim God is like. Badly nuanced engagements with religion by the new atheists, conflating extremism-driven atrocities with belief in God, have kept the debate in the outer court.

In their latest contribution to the God debate, Zacharias and Vitale do not engage secular thought as a common front but address it at its finer strands. This enables a more trenchant and less generic engagement.

Setting up in soft focus, the authors sharpen out to expose the traces of Photoshop that clothe the emperor of unbelief – from the blown-out appropriation of science to shore up atheism to logical fallacies.

Zacharias’s insistent appeal to the deepest human sensibility, such as a mother’s loss and a parent’s despair, starkly contrast him with Dawkins in his element.

The Christian apologist takes issue with Dawkins bringing more heat than light to the God debate. He recalls a gathering where Dawkins, addressing a question on how to respond to a person who believes in God, responded: “Mock them. Ridicule them.”

Dawkins elaborated his position last year: “I’m all for offending people’s religion. It should be offended at every opportunity.”

Sadly, this attitude has taken centre stage in the debate about God’s existence and the place of religion in public life, with tropes built to offend rather than to engage, and to ostracise rather than to enlighten people of faith.

In an archetypical passage, Dawkins mocks the God of the Old Testament as “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

This characterisation of God, Zacharias responds, presents a stumbling block for Dawkins’ own atheistic position. Given that he denies the existence of God and puts the Judeo-Christian deity down to fiction, the evils he attributes him become human evil on display.

But atheistic evolution, of which Dawkins is a proponent, denies life a higher purpose, positing an amoral planet where the survival of the fittest is supreme law. His passage requires coming around to the recognition of an intelligent and moral first cause to human existence as a basis from presupposing good and evil.

Zacharias likes this contradiction to Charles Darwin’s dilemma. Darwin wrote that “if men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.”

The Darwinian principle of survival precludes capacity for a moral order.

Vitale rejects the new atheists’ assertion the science has buried God. “No discovery of science (so far, at any rate) has the least tendency to show that there is no God,” he cites Peter van Inwagen, one of the world’s foremost philosophers.

Science megastars in the atheist camp, including Dawkins and Stephen Hawking, have dismissed religion to a primitive resort of explaining phenomena that went over people’s heads. They argue that as knowledge advances, science is diminishing the relevance of the god of the gaps.

Christian scientists like John Lennox have short-circuited this idea as a convenient straw man for the preaching atheists. Vitale gives the example of a time when people erroneously traced madness to lunar phases, hence the term lunatic.

When the theory was debunked, the logical outcome was not denying the existence of the moon or its actual functions. Denying God’s existence because of the science has debunked cases of misdirected attribution would be similarly a logical overreach.

Not only do I think science is incompatible with belief in God; Vitale argues that science points to the existence of God, and puts up discoveries that the universe has a beginning, is knowable, regular and finely tuned for life as scientific bases for theism.

The fact that the universe is just right for life, supported, at the dawn of existence, by favourable features like the strength of gravity, the amount of dark energy and the strength of electromagnetism, has persuaded scientific minds that a superintellect set our world going.

Astronomer Fred Hoyle compared the random emergence of even the simplest cell of life to “the likelihood of a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and just by chance assembling a perfect Boeing 747 airplane”.

“Improbability is added to improbability until our minds are reeling in incomprehensible numbers,” William Lane Craig explains while “The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy claims: “The apparent probability of all the necessary conditions sufficient to allow just the formation of planets (let alone life) coming together just by chance is utterly outrageously tiny.”

For Vitale, cosmological breakthroughs over the past century offer the vindication rather than the disincentive for belief in the existence of God as the intelligent first cause preceding existence.

To Dawkins and many other atheists’ question: “Who created God?” Vitale argues that such a way of proceeding would lead to an infinite regress of explanations and foreclose the possibility of ever coming to a position. God existing before time, does not require a cause.

These essays are worthy reflection for anyone interested in the God debate, scientific advances on the origins of life, the moral claims of religion and the place of God in public life.

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