What's Wrong with Atheism? — Science and God | 5 Minute Video

Is there any meaning to life? Or is life nothing more than a cosmic accident? Scientific atheists claim the latter, but ironically, it’s science itself that suggests the former.

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Script:

In a recent interview, while I was presenting some scientific discoveries that may point to the existence of God, a camera operator, a young woman whom I’ll call Maria, began to weep visibly. Later she told me the reason for her tears.

Like many young people, Maria believed in God when she arrived in college. But while there, she repeatedly encountered professors who insisted that based on “the science” God was a myth. 

No more real than Santa Claus.

Maria didn’t feel equipped to challenge her professors. She eventually left college with nagging doubts about her faith and wondering whether life, including her own life, might be nothing more than a cosmic accident.

Many young people share Maria’s doubts.

Indeed powerful voices in the academy tell us that science makes belief in God—and human significance—untenable. For example, as Richard Dawkins, the famed atheist from Oxford, has asserted “[t]he universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose…nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

But are we the product of such indifference—that is, purely materialistic processes that “did not have us in mind” as another scientific atheist has put it? Does the universe have the properties we should expect if this “all there is is matter” vision of reality is correct? 

Perhaps not. Three major scientific discoveries contradict the expectations of scientific atheists and point instead in a distinctly God-friendly direction. 

First, the Big Bang. Discoveries in observational astronomy and developments in theoretical physics have revealed that the universe had a beginning. This is contrary to the expectations of scientific materialists, who long portrayed the universe as eternal and self-existent and, therefore, in no need of an external creator.  

This evidence for a beginning has instead confirmed the expectations of theists. Nobel laureate Arno Penzias helped make a key discovery establishing a cosmic beginning. He later observed, “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the first five books of Moses. . .and the Bible as a whole.” 

And he’s not alone. Cosmological evidence has led other prominent scientists—including former MIT physicist Gerald Schroeder and the great Caltech astronomer Allan Sandage—to affirm a transcendent creator beyond space and time as the best explanation for the origin of our finite universe. 

Second, fine-tuning. We live in what Australian physicist Luke Barnes calls an extremely “Fortunate Universe,” where fundamental laws and physical parameters have somehow been “fine-tuned” with just the right strengths and values to make life possible. The incredible odds against this happening by chance has led even agnostic and atheistic physicists to marvel. As British physicist Paul Davies has exclaimed, “the impression of design is overwhelming.” Atheist physicist George Greenstein expresses similar cognitive dissonance: “The thought insistently arises that some supernatural...Agency, must be involved…”  

Third, the complexity of life. Molecular biology has revealed the presence in living cells of an exquisite world of informational nano-technology—digital code in DNA and RNA; tiny, intricately-constructed molecular machines, a complex, information storage, transmission and processing system that resembles, but vastly exceeds, our most advanced digital high-technology.

Not what anyone would expect to see as the result of blind materialistic processes. 

Dawkins himself may have conceded as much when he recently confessed to being knocked “sideways with wonder at the miniaturized intricacy of the data-processing machinery in the living cell.” 

So what should we make of all this?

[cortneymaitland]

'whats wrong with atheism' the same thing that's wrong with the other 4, 000+ beliefs of earth. the believers. Humans are so stuck in their ways and unwilling to open up to the possibility that they could be wrong. They've been conditioned since birth to believe their way is correct and everyone else is wrong. That's a giant red flag that points towards cultism. When it comes to controlling the masses, Fear is the best tool. Fear is the foundation that most religions use, which explains why they have their versions of Hell. On that note, If you need to be threatened with eternal torture or promised eternal life after death to be a good person, you're not a good person.

[zinganeatsr]

“Professors would teach that God wasn’t real.” Most my professors did was say think critically. Never had we discussed God.

[richardberger]

Just because you don't understand anything or cannot comprehend the complexity of something, that does not mean "Therefore god did it". If you showed a caveman a TV, Car or even a lighter, they might think you are a god.

[marin]

Can we agree that this story with the extremely common trope in Christian propaganda of the «atheist teacher who’s a douchebag, doesn’t respect other people e beliefs and spends his time trying to convince religious students » most likely never happened?

[dodonodens]

Remember we haven’t discovered everything about the universe and how it actually works.
Science is about discovery not discrimination.

[missmorbid]

Have you heard of the puddle argument? If a puddle woke up one day and saw it’s situation, it might say,

“This hole I’m in suits me very nicely, in fact, it fits me perfectly. It must have been designed for me”

Of course, the puddle’s hole wasn’t designed for it, the puddle wasn’t designed at all, it just adapted its shape to fit the hole.

Another way to think of it is how languages develop. Every known culture on Earth has some kind of language. However, the odds of any specific language developing are astronomical because of all the factors that influence a language’s development.

The same is true of the universe and of life. If the constants of the universe were different, life would also be completely alien to us, or not exist at all.

Life on Earth adapted to fit the circumstances it was in, the circumstances on Earth weren’t designed for life.

[Nanofuture]

Just regurgitating long refuted talking points along with weird anecdotes.
1. I can't speak for anyone else, but when I went to college none of my professors said God was a myth. The only time the topic of God even came up was in courses on philosophy and religion.
2. The universe having a beginning doesn't logically necessitate a creator as time can simply be a property of the universe. If you would rather appeal to empiricism instead, then we have no observed instances of gods creating universes.
3. The vast majority of the universe is not "fine tuned" for life. It is instead extremely hostile to life as we know it, especially if you mean human life in particular. Even our own planet is inhospitable to human life beyond a few areas without the aid of technology. It is rather life that has evolved to fit the reality it finds itself in.
4. The complexity of life is again explained by evolution, a wholly natural process.

To be clear, none of this proves that a god does not exist, but the claim that a god does exist has not been rationally justified.

[emmaxop]

If Maria couldn't handle having her views challenged at college maybe she shouldn't have gone to college lmao

[somerandom]

1. The big bang:
How do you get from our understanding of the big bang to a god existing? It doesn't appear that a god was involved anywhere in this process, so I'm unsure how it can be evidence of a god.

2. Fine-tuning: how have you worked out the odds? What are the odds of any of the constants being anything different? What evidence do you have to show that they even could be different? And what evidence do you have of a god's involvement?

3. the complexity of life: again, where is the evidence of a god's involvement here? We know the natural processes that produce these things. And none of those processes involved a god.

In short, what evidence do you have of a god's involvement in any of these things?

[randomdude]

1:45 1. "The big bang" is not claimed to be a "beginning". Rather, the "big bang" is a hypothesis resulting from applying Einstein's equations to reverse the current observation of universe expansion. The result of those equations indicates that at a point ~13.7 billion years ago, the *observable* part of the universe was extremely dense and located in a microscopically small space. What the equations and science does not tell us (yet, hopefully) is what or whether anything had happened before that point. Science doesn't regard that absence of information as being conclusive of anything. We're not claiming that this was a beginning, but rather it's as far back as we are currently able to examine.

[late]

Why am I not surprised to hear the exact same arguments that have been used for ages just a little rehashed? First the contingency argument, then the fine-tuning argument and finally the teleological argument.

[justaguy]

In all my years in college and university, not ONE time did I hear a professor try and proclaim to a classroom that "God is dead." I heard only a very few, maybe two, that subtly implied they were theists or there was a god of some sort, but not once have I heard this personally. And every single story LIKE this is ambiguous, anonymous, no school much less teacher cited. So I'm not convinced this is an honest assertion.

[drfoxcourt]

Whenever an apologist says, "A person" with no further citation, it should be taken as a fiction. Without presented evidence, we should not assume what Meyer, or anyone else tells us about an otherwise anonymous person isn't really, but a fiction to make a point.

[riccardo_aquilanti]

1. The Big Bang describes how the universe evolved, not how it began.

2. Fine-Tuning is unlikely without a god? How many universes have you observed in order to say this? 1.
I don't think that's how probability works...

A misconception and a bad understanding of probability, keep up the good work.

[IoannisAndroulakis]

These are the weakest arguments I have ever seen in my life. Weaker than my triceps.

[burniejarvis]

When someone starts of with a fake story you know his arguments aren't going to get better.

[TimPorterIstanbul]

What's Wrong with Atheism? Nothing.

[yeshua]

Just say "GOD DID IT!' Over and over again 😊👍

[musiccer]

None of these discoveries are evidence for a god. They just showcase our lack of understanding of this universe

[ptolemyauletesxii]

Translation: I'm going to misrepresent what science and atheists say, then tell you that because the ramifications of what they actually say make me feel uncomfortable and unimportant I have the right to ignore this and alter reality so that I feel comfortable and important.