The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune

Letter writer Porcupine’s recent write-up was more an atheistic polemic against Christianity in particular and theism in general than a counterargument against the Biblical injunction on recreational marijuana.

The misandric tenor of the letter leads me to believe that the writer is female. Be that as it may, hardly anything was said in defence of recreational marijuana. Porcupine’s quote from famed theoretical physicist Albert Einstein about belief in a personal God being childish piqued my curiosity because in Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe, the famed physicist said the following: “There are people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views.”

Like the noted Jewish-Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, Einstein was a deist, although he was deeply influenced by atheist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. To be sure, Einstein’s theology was convoluted, to say the least. He didn’t believe in free will, immortality or eternal judgment. Einstein was what you would call a determinist. Whatever Einstein was, he was not an atheist, although he tried feverishly to repudiate the clear implications of his groundbreaking general relativity theory by coming up with another theory, the Cosmological Constant.

One cannot conflate deism with atheism. Atheism is defined as the lack of belief in God, as per American atheists. Medieval Catholic theologian Anselm defined God as “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” Granted, while Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God is deductive, it is, like Thomas Aquinas’s (a posteriori) Efficient Cause argument, insuperable. As Dr Norman Geisler and Peter Bocchino stated in Unshakable Foundations, God is the First Cause or uncaused Cause, therefore it would be just as meaningless to ask how the colour green tastes as it would be to ask when was God created.

Anyone who would ask such a question would be guilty of committing the infinite regress fallacy. Also, as Augustine once noted, there was no time before the creation of the universe. God dwells in eternity, where the physical laws of science do not apply. Consequently, it would be meaningless to ask what was God doing for billions of years before we came along. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years did not exist prior to Genesis 1:1.

Porcupine mentioned science as if it is pitted against Christianity and the Bible, apparently ignorant of modern science being birthed in the Catholic monasteries of Christendom Europe during the Middle Ages. Also apparently unbeknownst to Porcupine, Einstein’s general theory of relativity, as well as Hubble’s Law and the expanding universe and Arno Penzias’ and Robert Woodrow Wilson’s discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation and NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite data all corroborates the Genesis account of the beginning of space, time and matter.

Moreover, the most fundamental law of physics, the 2nd law of thermodynamics, corroborates the Fall in Genesis 3. This scientific law states that everything breaks down and tends towards disorder. That is why humans and animals grow old and die. And that is why Romans 8:20 says that creation has been subjected to futility.

Bear in mind that at the time of the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in the 1960s, two-thirds of scientists subscribed to Sir Fred Hoyle’s Steady State theory, which is a repackaged version of Newtonian science and the cosmological theories of the ancient Greeks and Romans, Buddhism and Hinduism. Like the late Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time, who posited a multiverse theory, all of the foregoing cosmologies contradicts, not only the Biblical account of creation, but settled science as well. What’s more, both Buddhism and Hinduism have been invalidated as true religions by cosmology, as both “posit endless cycles of time stretching into the indefinite past.”

The Bible is not a science textbook. Its moral, civil and ceremonial laws are prescriptive; whereas scientific laws are descriptive. The Bible deals with both the phenomenal (physical) and noumenal (spiritual) realms of reality.

Some 134 years after the death of Charles Darwin, evolution continues to experience insurmountable hurdles. It is a theory filled with gaping holes. Human physiology with its intricate, complex design is a glaring indication that the theory of intelligent design is unassailable.

One of the more vocal members of the so-called Four Horsemen of New Atheism, biologist Richard Dawkins, said the following in his 1986 publication The Blind Watchmaker: ‘‘There is enough storage capacity in the DNA of a single lily seed or a single salamander sperm to store the Encyclopaedia Britannica 60 times over. Some species of the unjustly called ‘primitive’ amoebas have as much information in their DNA as 1,000 Encyclopedia Britannicas.’’

As an avowed atheist, Dawkins obviously understands the implications of the breathtaking complexity of human cells, hence his advocacy of directed pansmermia, a theory that says that extraterrestrial beings had transmitted organisms on earth.

Porcupine, based on the tenor of her letter, is obviously morally outraged at the atrocities committed in the name of Christianity.

As for the Inquisition, the Crusades and the Salem witch hunts, only about 200,000 persons were killed in these events over a period of centuries. Conversely, atheist regimes have murdered 148 million human beings between 1917 and 2007, which is just 90 years. Atheists love to exaggerate the crimes of Christianity by inflating the casualty numbers, while conveniently ignoring the ‘democide’ numbers of the likes of Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong. A small fry like Cambodian dictator Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge communist administration murdered two million people between 1975 - 1979. That’s about nine times the number of persons killed by the church in its 2,000 years of existence.

In closing, the main bone of contention Porcupine has with my Biblical worldview is that I dared to voice my opposition to recreational marijuana on Biblical grounds. Once again, I believe science supports my position, as it also supports the Biblical view of creation in the Old Testament Book of Genesis - a text that Porcupine scoffs as being a fairytale.

The issue of recreational marijuana is not only a moral one. It is also a health issue. Therefore the Christian Council as well as the entire Christian community should oppose any move to legalise recreational marijuana.

KEVIN EVANS

Freeport

Grand Bahama

November 28, 2018