God's Fingerprints, Second Edition

Evidence for the Christian God Is All Around All of Us All of the Time

Watts

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621895688
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

God's Fingerprints seeks to show why Christianity is the only rational faith system appropriate to the universe we inhabit. The super-person of God the Holy Trinity alone will suffice.Starting from scientific tools that we all may use, and constraints to which we all are subject, God's Fingerprints moves to the very simple evidence of everyone's experience, arriving at the question of our origins, possible religious and philosophical views we may adopt, and the central questions of truth and morals.

1

Bias

We all have bias, so let us start there!

Everyone has a bias. What has brought this home to me is the way in which some people, particularly those who claim to be atheists, stress that they are without bias! They make the assumption that there is a neutral way of approaching life, and then assume that that way is what they follow. How wrong they are! Let us take a moment to look at this.

Are atheists merely irrational, or are they mystics?

First, what is the basis for being an atheist? What evidence is there that atheism is true? How can we be sure there is no god, either inside or outside the universe? Plainly there is only one way: we need total knowledge of everything inside and outside of the universe. Only then will we know enough to be able to say definitely that there is no god, always provided that we do not find something to alter that opinion!

A long time ago, I considered this viewpoint, and concluded that I did not have enough knowledge to accept it. As a teenager, I came to the conclusion that such a claim would be both irrational and totally arrogant—irrational, because no one has such knowledge—and arrogant, because to claim such knowledge is impossible. What appealed to me far more was the agnostic view,1 which was certainly not so easily shown to be irrational, and which also had some humility suited to the limited intellect of human beings.

Agnosticism was the view popularized by Darwin’s friend, T. H. Huxley, who also viewed atheism in the way I did. What I find quite amazing about the present time is that there are actually people in the world who claim to be atheists. How did they come to this belief, this faith-system? That is the only way it can be described, since no atheist I have encountered has yet claimed to have total knowledge of absolutely everything, a claim which would easily be open to testing!

Judging from the strength of some atheist opinions, they presumably have access to a secret source of information known only to themselves. There are atheists who have stated openly on the internet that since they consider Christians to be irrational, they can only envisage violence as the way of helping Christians to see what they call reason! And of course, as Peter Hitchens, the Christian brother of the late atheist Christopher Hitchens, demonstrated so clearly in a recent book,2 Marxist atheists tried state-inspired violence against Christianity, and the result was that Christianity grew. Of course, there is an ancient Chinese proverb which states that the person who resorts to violence admits thereby that he has lost the argument!

But what calls forth this intemperate outburst from these atheists? Have they perhaps heard a voice calling out from the sky, “It’s all right— God really doesn’t exist!”? Mysticism is perhaps the only way in which an atheist can cling to his opinion whilst believing he is also rational. And atheists will never convince the ordinary rational Christian this way.

If Christianity is true, it is not surprising that venomous attacks have been made against it from every conceivable angle. The Christian view of humankind is that we are in rebellion against our creator and in desperate need, instead of being masters of our fate. Science today clearly points to our ultimate total extermination by the forces of the universe around us, unless an alternative possibility such as Christianity is true. Because of this, the only possible secular basis for morality is human preferences, which rarely agree! Into this hopeless situation, the evidence-based religion of Christ brings hope, meaning and a morality based on love.

Sampling an atheist opinion in philosophy

Let us look at one or two specimen atheists. By this I do not mean the high profile “new atheists,” such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, whose views have been validly criticized by writers such as Alister McGrath, Peter Hitchens and others, including more serious atheist thinkers such as Michael Ruse.3 I mean those atheists who try to follow a common-sense route of thinking.

For instance, we might look at the philosopher Julian Baggini, who has committed his basic opinions to print.4 I had hoped before reading this book that he would first deal with the problem of no evidence for the atheist position, but it was not to be. For instance, in his first chapter, he stated, “My main aim in this book is to provide a positive case for atheism, one that is not simply about rubbishing religious belief. In other words, I hope it will be as much about why one should be an atheist, as why one should not be a theist.” I read on in hope, but three pages on, I encountered a comment on evangelical Christians in relation to those car bumper stickers which ask you to honk if you love Jesus. Baggini stated, “The crass simplicity of this world view can be darkly comic, in that it throws into relief how easy it is for humans to give in to comforting idiocy.”

It so happens that I can be described as an evangelical Christian, a worldview I eventually came to hold long after rejecting atheism as irrational and approaching the matter of religious faith as an open-minded agnostic. It is important for agnostics to have open minds, for otherwise they betray their belief that they have not been able to make up their mind one way or another. But if they do make up their minds, they stop being agnostics! What struck me was not simply that Dr Baggini made this particular criticism of my worldview, because I have encountered far worse (!), but that he had not laid any foundation for his assertions. I think this shows a little of his bias!

When he moved on to considering evidence for and against atheism, Baggini asserted, “all the strong evidence tells in favor of atheism, and only weak evidence tells against it.” In fact, he seemed so certain of this that he repeated it almost in the same words only one page later. When he came to consider what he called weak evidence, he then set up an Aunt Sally of evidence for life after death, and knocked it down to his satisfaction. When Baggini considered strong evidence, he wrote of natural law and seemed to think this was in atheism’s favor, without considering that many Christians with experience of research science (like myself) fully accept natural law. Indeed it is only because of this acceptance that Christians can talk of the miraculous, a matter which I discuss in a subsequent chapter. And as a scientist, I am not so dogmatic as to exclude the miraculous, because if I do so, I may miss something of the utmost importance.

I think that Baggini’s compartmentalization (naturalism versus supernaturalism) is really another form of bias in his thinking! I would love to discuss what I have written subsequently in this book with him. Even if he does not accept my argument, he may (perhaps, one hopes) revise his opinion of evangelical Christians! I think his biggest problem comes when he considers morals, and arrives only at the criterion of human preferences for these important matters (well, perhaps not all such preferences—he appears selective, or as I would say, biased). The reader will have to read the rest of my book to see why human moral and ethical preference is a problem, and what the Christian answer is.

Bias in the study of history

Dr Baggini is a philosopher, and I consider philosophy an important subject for Christians. For my other example of atheist bias, I would like to include history, also a very important subject for Christians, so let us move on to a historian who claims to be an atheist, Robin Lane Fox.5 His book purports to deal with the Bible as a historical work. What intrigued me when I read it was the statement in his acknowledgements, “. . . my views of the early history of the Hebrew Scriptures have been formed by the insights of J. Wellhausen, more than a century ago. Modern attempts to depart from their main principles have mostly confirmed me in the widely shared acceptance that Wellhausen was right.” Perhaps he did not know that Wellhausen was an anti-Semitic German nationalist who took a “Hegelian” view of factual data. (On being told that his theory of history conflicted with the known facts, the philosopher Hegel once said, “So much the worse for the facts!”) Wellhausen was arrogant and totally dismissive of evidence which proved him wrong. His views on the origin of the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, are unsubstantiated by archaeology, and largely without any evidence of any sort. I have a book, Lex Mosaica, published in 1894 by a panel of distinguished scholars including linguists and archaeologists, which takes him and other so-called “higher critics” to task for their very arrogant views. The clear evidence of archaeology never seems to have played any part in forming the opinions of these critics!

Understanding Wellhausen—a game

To try to understand Wellhausen, let us have a little game. In 2011, for the very first time, I went to Normandy and saw the famous Bayeux Tapestry. Let us be clear what this tapestry really is.6 European historians and archaeologists virtually unite on the following details. The tapestry is not a tapestry, but a superb embroidery produced soon after the Norman invasion of England in 1066 AD. It was probably a gift for Bishop Odo of Bayeux, a half-brother of William the Conqueror, and was made in the south of England before 1082. It was mentioned in the inventory of Bayeux Cathedral in 1476, and engravings of it were published in two volumes of a famous French book in 1729-30. It was nearly ruined during the French Revolution, on at least two occasions, but in 1803, Napoleon had it exhibited in a museum in Paris as propaganda for his proposed invasion of England (“We beat the English once and we can do it again.”) which never happened!

Now, let us imagine we are extreme English nationalists, and do not like the French. (I actually think they are wonderful people, who have given the world some excellent wines and food!) What do we do about the Norman Conquest, in relation to the Bayeux Tapestry’s account of the French beating the English? Well, for a start, we can say that it was forged by the French for Napoleon’s exhibition in 1803, and the Norman Conquest never really happened. But what about the references to the tapestry in the fifteenth century? Well, we can write them off as not relating to this tapestry! And what about the engravings of it in the eighteenth century? Well, they were later forgeries to give credibility to the tapestry!

This is the same cavalier approach to science, archaeology and history adopted by Professor Julius Wellhausen. He clearly did not like Judaism, and wa...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Reviews of the First Edition
• Preface to Second Edition
• Preface to First Edition
• Prologue
• Part A: Tools and constraints: fingerprint powder
• Chapter 1: Bias
• Chapter 2: Why it matters what we believe
• Chapter 3: Where do I begin?
• Chapter 4: What can I trust?
• Chapter 5: Limits: space and time
• Chapter 6: The framework and the flesh
• Chapter 7: Reason: what is it?
• Chapter 8: Experience: how do I understand it?
• Part B: Phenomena of naïve experience: the fingerprints
• Chapter 9: Something or nothing?
• Chapter 10: Order and chaos
• Chapter 11: Sequence and consequence
• Chapter 12: Identity and personality
• Chapter 13: Communications?
• Part C: From fingerprints to identification
• Chapter 14: Origins
• Chapter 15: Possibilities
• Chapter 16: Purity and profanity
• Chapter 17: Listen . . . is there anyone there?
• Chapter 18: The step which matters
• Chapter 19: Why choose?
• Chapter 20: Truth and falsehood
• Chapter 21: Right and wrong
• Chapter 22: Alpha and Omega
• Bibliography