This review of Lee Strobel’s book, “The Case For a Creator” was done in 2004, soon after the book was published.
If you find I’m overbearing or am making you uncomfortable with your faith, let me know and I will discontinue it.
If on the Internet simply delete this page.
Let me give you some kindly advice first.
Religious beliefs are based on Faith, not Science – 8 comments:
(1) If you depend on the Bible or other Holy Book(s) as a source of inspiration, guidance, or belief, it is very dangerous to try to justify your beliefs by rational, scientific arguments or evidence. Science is provisional in its statements whereas religious belief is usually absolute in its statements. If you justify your religious beliefs by science you may find that the absolutes in your religious beliefs will be undermined.
It is very tempting to want confirmation of your beliefs via other sources, such as Science, but I would warn you against making these sources the basis for your religious beliefs.
(2) The essential characteristics of Science are quite different from those of Religion.
The essential characteristics of science are:
(1) It is guided by natural law.
(2) It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law.
(3) It is testable against the empirical world.
(4) Its conclusions are tentative, — are not necessarily the final word.
(5) It is falsifiable.
This makes science so powerful and successful, and so different from all other ways of gaining knowledge of reality.
Compare these characteristics with the characteristics of religion such as the many variety of Creationism, including Intelligent Design (ID) which depend on a supernatural realm.
It may happen that not all things have a naturalistic explanation, but so far there has not been any evidence to believe otherwise. There is no reliable evidence for the existence of the supernatural or the existence of any supernatural entities (In the last 150 years science has been used to try to confirm supernatural entities and processes — nothing convincing has been found). As far as the evidence goes, what a person believes are supernatural entities are only entities in the brain of that person — they die when the brain dies. No evidence, no scientific reason to assume another realm beyond the natural. Until there is definite evidence of a supernatural realm there is no basis for assuming it — this is, as all things in science, provisional.
Ask yourself:
How far would science develop if supernatural causes (e.g. God, gods, miracles,
holy ghost, evil spirits, heaven, hell, angels, long dead deities) were acceptable
in explaining processes? The death of science would follow soon thereafter.
What about appealing to other supernatural causes such as astrology, phrenology, tarot card reading, crystal healing, and astral projection?
Theories in Science are provisional. The theory that the Earth is round and not flat has so much evidential support that the theory is considered fact.
This theory is still provisional, just in case evidence is found to contradict or modify the theory.
Similarly Evolutionary theory has so much evidential support that it is considered a fact.
Science has many gaps of knowledge. For example, the scarcity of fossils doesn’t mean that the overall evolutionary theory is false. Fossil gaps will take time to fill and in many cases may never happen. It takes very unusual natural conditions to produce fossils, so the scarcity. Fossils are only a small part of the evidence, molecular biology is another more major part.
To explain any gap in knowledge, even after much research, does not require an appeal to the supernatural.
Religionists would love to appeal to the supernatural; then there would be no need for further research because the answer would always be supernatural.
continuing to the second part of this page
Naturalism and Religious Experience 