Nobel laurate Stephen Weinberg, one of the more radical atheists out there, had written the following: “The most extreme hope for science is that we will be able to trace the explanation of all natural phenomena to final laws and historical accidents.”
That’s the “most extreme hope?” To understand that all we are, and all that creation is—is just a bunch of accidents? (Of course, if what he says were true, then we would have no reason to believe what he said because, well, what he said was the result of mere accidents as well, and so—what reason would anyone have to believe his words?).
Meanwhile, one of the America’s most celebrated philosophers in the last half of the 20th century, the late Richard Rorty, argued that we are never going to understand truth, that it’s silly to even try, and that even the concept of “truth” is, itself, misguided. Instead of trying to understand reality, Rorty said that all we can do is hope to cope with it.
So, 2500 years of Western thought climaxes with the idea that the universe arose by accident and all we can try to do is to cope with it.
Pretty dismal, is it not?
What a contrast to the biblical view of reality, in which our world, far from begin an accident, is the result of the planned and deliberate work of the Creator, the God who, after day by day, step by step, purposely creating our world and life on it (See Genesis 1-2), also said: “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness,” (Genesis 1:26). What a contrast to the “historical accidents” that, according to Weinberg, explain us.
Instead of us being, what physicist Sean Carroll calls, “organized blobs of mud,” we are beings purposely created by God to reflect His character and to reveal His goodness to the world. The good news, too, about this belief is that we, truly, have good reasons for believing in God as our Creator. Everything from Bible prophecy, to the powerful evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, to the testimony of our senses as they encounter and interact with the created world—together they all give us wonderful reasons to do the following:
Make a joyful shout to the LORD, all you lands!
Serve the LORD with gladness;
Come before His presence with singing.
Know that the LORD, He is God;
It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves (Psalm 100:1-3).
That is, of course, unless one—going against common sense, reason, and Word of God, believes that we are nothing but “blobs of organized mud” who resulted from “historical accidents” and that, because we can’t know truth, anyway, merely need to learn how to cope?
Take your pick.
