[The End of Reason]

On the Existence and Design of the Universe

“The very starting point for an atheistic universe is based on something that cannot explain its own existence. The scientific laws by which atheists want all certainty established do not even exist as a category at the beginning of the universe because, according to those laws of science by which atheists want to measure all things, matter cannot simply ‘pop into existence’ on its own.”

“Donald Page of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Science has calculated the odds against our universe randomly taking a form suitable for life as one out of 10,000,000,000¹²⁴—a number that exceeds all imagination. Astronomers Fred Hoyle and N.C. Wickramasinghe found that the odds of the random formation of a single enzyme from amino acids anywhere on our planet’s surface are one in 10²⁰. Furthermore, they observe, ‘The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (10²⁰)^20,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.’ And this is just one step in the formation of life. Nothing has yet been said about DNA and where it came from, or of the transcription of DNA to RNA, which scientists admit cannot even be numerically computed. Nor has anything been said of mitosis or meiosis. One would have to conclude that the chance of the random ordering of organic molecules is not essentially different from a big fat zero.”

“The cry of reason is irrepressible, and the average person can see through the illogicality of the claims of atheism and the emptiness they lead to. I know all the responses, the arguments declaring that in spite of all the statistical improbabilities we are still here and this proves we have come from such origins. I know this is enough reason for the skeptic. But the assumptions and deductions they have to make leave us marveling that people who say they believe these things actually do believe them—deductions, I might add, that you would never make from micro-processes in the lab or in daily living or in the courtroom.”

“Carl Sagan said all we need is one message with information in it from outer space and we’d be able to recognize the presence of intelligence. We won’t even need to translate the message, he said; we’ll just recognize the presence of intelligence. When it suits the atheist, only intelligence can explain intelligibility, but when it is discomforting, primordial self-existent soup will do. They cannot hide their prejudices.”

“If life is random, then the inescapable consequence, first and foremost, is that there can be no ultimate meaning and purpose to existence. This consequence is the Achilles’ heel of atheistic belief… [At] least Voltaire, Sartre, and Nietzsche were honest and consistent in their views. They admitted the ridiculousness of life, the pointlessness of everything in an atheistic world. Contemporary atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, however, are so blind to the conceit of their own minds that they try to present this view of life as some sort of triumphal liberation.”

On the Nature of Morality

“How conveniently the atheist plays word games! When it is Stalin or Pol Pot who does the slaughtering, it is because they are deranged or irrational ideologues; their atheism has nothing to do with their actions. But when a Holocaust is engendered by an ideologue, it is the culmination of four hundred years of Christian intolerance for the Jew.”

“If the murder of innocents is wrong, it is wrong not because science tells us it is wrong but because every life has intrinsic worth—a postulate that atheism simply cannot deduce.”

“What is the objective moral framework Harris adopts on which he has built his entire critique of God? His emotion-laden critique hangs on an argument that says, ‘I can see no moral framework operating in the world, but what I do see is morally condemnable.’ In philosophical terms, this is called a mutually exclusive assumption. Therefore, the moral framework he is forced to adopt is, in reality, one he built himself.”

“When you assert that there is such a thing as evil, you must assume there is such a thing as good. When you say there is such a thing as good, you must assume there is a moral law by which to distinguish between good and evil. There must be some standard by which to determine what is good and what is evil. When you assume a moral law, you must posit a moral lawgiver—the source of the moral law. But this moral lawgiver is precisely who atheists are trying to disprove.”

“‘Why is a moral lawgiver necessary in order to recognize good and evil?’ For the simple reason that a moral affirmation cannot remain an abstraction. The person who moralizes assumes intrinsic worth in himself or herself and transfers intrinsic worth to the life of another, and thus he or she considers that life worthy of protection (as in the illustrations Harris gives, namely, rape, torture, murder, and natural catastrophes). Transcending value must come from a person of transcending worth. But in a world in which matter alone exists there can be no intrinsic worth. Let me put it in philosophical terms: Objective moral values exist only if God exists. Objective moral values do exist [a point Harris concedes in his letter]. Therefore God exists.” (emphasis mine)

“Christianity teaches that every single life has ultimate value. In secularism, while there is no ultimate value to a life, the atheist subjectively selects particular values to applaud. The game is played every day by the relativist camp, while it refuses to allow the other side the benefit of playing by the same rules.”

“A person may dismissively say that he or she does not see a moral order. But I strongly suspect that the real issue is not an absence of moral order in the world but the insistence of determining for oneself what is good and what is evil, in spite of what we intuitively know to be true… Why do we humans naturally resist God’s moral order? Because behind all the arguments is a clenched fist… Beneath all the intellectual verbiage is a covert desire to have a world without God. Why? Aldous Huxley answered on behalf of all skeptics when he wrote that he wanted the world not to have meaning so that he would be set free from all the moral demands of religion.”

“The difference between someone who calls himself or herself a Christian and yet kills and slaughters and an atheist who does the same thing is that the Christian is acting in violation of his or her own belief, while the atheist’s action is the legitimate outworking of his or her belief.”

“Apart from a moral framework, pleasure is a sure path to sensual bankruptcy. No, the Christian who enjoys legitimate pleasure within God’s boundaries experiences life as a perpetual novelty. The boundary-less life of sensual pleasure is a field of landmines, fraught with the real risk that even the very possibility of pleasure might be blown away.”

The Christian Worldview

“The worldview of the Christian faith is simple enough. God has put enough into this world to make faith in him a most reasonable thing. But he has left enough out to make it impossible to live by sheer reason alone.”

“Routinely, three tests for truth are applied: (1) logical consistency, (2) empirical adequacy, and (3) experiential relevance. When submitted to these tests, the Christian message meets the demand for truth.”

“[Nothing] in this physical universe can explain its own existence, i.e., something does not come from nothing. Therefore, in order for there to be something (and there is), there must be at least one state that is self-existent and does not derive its existence from something else. And it must be something nonphysical.”

“The argument [for design] is not of aesthetic design but of intelligent specificity. It is important to distinguish between the two. If you walked onto a distant planet and saw a million stones in a perfect triangle, you could, of course, argue that over millions of years this formation could have randomly happened in a pleasantly aesthetic way… But suppose I took a trip to a distant planet and saw a crumpled piece of paper on which were written the words, ‘Hello, Ravi, did you bring some curry and rice with you?’ I would not in a million years conclude that this note was produced by the laws of physics. That note would have had to have been the result of intelligence, not chance. In the same way, the ‘raw materials’ that have resulted in this universe as we have it have been brought together simultaneously in the most amazing combinations—combinations too amazing to have just happened by accident. That is the argument to design.”

“It boils down to this: for the follower of Jesus Christ, the fact that the universe cannot explain itself, added to the obvious intelligence behind the universe, linked to the historical and experiential verification of what Jesus taught and did, make belief in him a very rational and existentially fulfilling reality.”