God No Longer Necessary Atheism on the Roll

God No Longer Necessary

Atheism on the Roll

Christian News, July 30, 2012

“Atheism on the March” the lead story of the April 23, 2012 Christian News taken from the March-April 2012 Religion Watch – “A Newsletter Monitoring Contemporary Religion” reported on what was billed as the “largest secular gathering in human history”. It was the “Reason Rally” held on March 24 in Washington, D.C.  The rally was organized by 20 atheist and humanist organizations.

The Reason Rally had several thousand more attendees than the “Godless March on Washington” in 2002. CN published a photo of Richard Dawkins, the doyen of the “new atheism,” who was the main speaker.

The July 16 Newsweek and July 23 TIME published articles which show that atheism continues on the roll in America.

“The Godless Particle – Science posits a new story of our creation” in the July 16 Newsweek (reprinted on p. 9) says that “The  God particle” brings science closer to dispensing with the need of any supernatural shenanigans all the way back to the beginning of the universe – and perhaps even before the beginning, if there was a before.”  Newsweek’s article concludes:

“IF THESE bold, some would say arrogant, notions derive support from the remarkable results at the Large Hadron Collider, they may reinforce two potentially uncomfortable possibilities; first, that many features of our universe, including our existence, may be accidental consequences of conditions associated with the universe’s birth; and second, that creating ‘stuff’ from ‘no stuff’ seems to be no problem at all–everything we see could have emerged as a purposeless quantum burp in space or perhaps a quantum burp of space itself. Humans, with their remarkable tools and their remarkable brains, may have just taken a giant step toward replacing metaphysical speculation with empirically verifiable knowledge. The Higgs particle is now arguably more relevant than God.”

The July 3 TIME has a 2-page photo of “The Cathedral of Science.” It says: “The elusive Higgs boson is at last found – and the universe gets a little less mysterious.”

TIME says:

“If physicists didn’t sound so smart, you’d swear they were making half this stuff up. The universe began with a big bang called, well, the Big Bang. It’s filled with wormholes and superstrings, dark matter and galactic bubbles, and assembled from little specks of stuff called fermions and leptons, top quarks and charm quarks, all of it glued together by, yes, gluons—and if you claim you understand a bit of it, you’re probably lying too.

“That’s the trouble with particle physics: it exists on a plane that the brain doesn’t visit–or at least most brains don’t—and wholly defies our intuitive sense of order and reason, of cause and effect, of the very upness and downness of up and down. So we throw up our hands and turn it over to the scientists, and maybe every few years we read a Stephen Hawking book just to keep up appearances.

“But when something really big happens, all that can change. As the Internet buzzed with the news that a wonderfully named God particle had been found, as the term Higgsteria was trending on Twitter, as scientists around the world opened champagne, the non-physics speaking joined in, high-fiving about a thing called a boson and cheering that the standard model had, in the nick of TIME, been saved. Now quick, what’s the standard model?

“There was an odd and merry disconnect between how little most people truly understood the breaking news from the physics world and the celebratory reaction that nonetheless followed it. SALK VACCINE WORKS! we get. MAN LANDS ON MOON! we get. Understanding reports that a team of scientists working for the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) had proved the existence of a particle called the Higgs boson—physics’ white whale since it was first postulated in 1964—is a far harder hill to climb.

“But the climb is worth it, for the discovery of the Higgs boson helps explain nothing less than why our existence is possible. The particle—named for Scottish physicist Peter Higgs, who was one of the small team of researchers who developed the idea—is the very reason any mass at all exists in the universe.

Energy is easy. But energy and matter are like steam and ice, two different states of the same thing. If you can’t ping energetic particles with something—the Higgs boson, we’ve now proved—then planets, suns, galaxies, nebulae, moons, comets, dogs and people don’t exist. A cold and soulless cosmos may not care either way, but we very much do.

“‘We are nothing but quarks and electrons and a lot of empty space,’ says physicist Fabiola Gianotti, who headed one of the two experimental teams at CERN that nailed down the discovery using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a $10 billion particle accelerator that crashes protons into one another at 99.9999991% of the speed of light.”

“The boson found in the deep tunnels at CERN goes to the very essence of everything. And in a manner as primal as the particles themselves, we seemed to grasp that. Despite our fleeting attention span, we stopped for a moment to contemplate something far, far bigger than ourselves. And when that happened, faith and physics—which don’t often shake hands—shared an embrace.”

“God is dead to many younger Americans,” an article on page 1 of the July 16, 2012 Christian News reprinted from the Washington TIMES noted: “The younger generation is becoming Godless – Increasing numbers of Americans under the age of 30 are skeptical about the existence of God. This will have profound repercussion upon our society, fostering moral disintegration and the eventual death of our Judeo-Christian civilization. Traditional America is dying. In its place, a new liberal barbarism is being born.”

A Pew Poll found that 31% of respondents of those born after 1980 say they doubt whether God exists. America is following the road paved by anti-Christian Europeans. “God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him,” said the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsch. The Washington TIMEs says: “It has taken America longer, but secularism is now crashing upon our shores. We are fated to walk in Europe’s footsteps.”

“The Tragedy of the Dumb Church” in the Christian Post (CN, July 16, 2012) says few churches are presenting their members, particularly youth with solid historic facts and sound Christian doctrine. The Christian Post said:

“Much of the Church today is dumb. Don’t misunderstand me, I mean no disrespect when I use the term ‘dumb’. What I mean is that the Church is dumb in that they aren’t well educated in what they believe, fail miserably in fulfilling 1 Peter 3:15 that says all Christians should be prepared to give a reason for why they believe, and are woefully unable to handle any challenge to Christianity that comes from unbelievers or the cults.”

The Age of the Dumb Church

Dr. R. C. Sproul has said many TIMES that he believes we are living in the most unintellectual period in the history of Western civilization. Over 30 years ago, former Lebanese ambassador to the United States, Charles Malik, said the following in his speech at the dedication of the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, Illinois: “I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough.

“Such statements made by Sproul, Malik, and others were not always heard in the Church. The fact is, the Church dominated intellectual thought and discourse for hundreds of years, producing such thinkers like Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Edwards, and others. Such men had their opponents (the Church always will), but their detractors never ridiculed their brainpower because the Churchman’s intellectual prowess left no room for it.”

During the last 50 years CN has reviewed hundreds of books which defend historic Christianity. CN has sold many of them. Reprinted in this issue from the August 19, 1974 Christian News is CN’s review of Charles Malik’s “The Wonder of Being”. (p. 10)

As atheism is on the roll, both youth and adults should be told about the Creation Research Society. Its leading founder, Dr. Walter Lammerts is known as “The Father of Scientific Rose Breeding.” He spoke at Trinity, New Haven, not long before the Creation Research Society was formed. He expressed a high regard for Christian News because it defended the Scriptural doctrine of creation and was willing to publish articles vs. evolution.  When the Creation Research Society was formed, hardly any official or unofficial publication in Lutheranism, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy promoted it. CN has often reprinted the statement of faith of this group of Christian men of science. It is in CN’s Baal or God published in 1965. 

The CRS has over 600 voting members (graduate degree in science).

The recently published Spring 2012 Creation Research Quarterly, (Vol. 48, No. 4) again has the CRS’s Statement. It is reprinted on p. 10 from the latest CRS Quarterly. As far as CN is aware, the organized conservatives and anti-Walther hypo-euros in the LCMS who want CN to close have not promoted the Creation Research Society or its Statement of Faith. They seldom mention any of the hundreds of books CN has promoted opposing atheism and defending historic Christianity and the Scriptural doctrine of Creation. The CN editor is considered an un-Lutheran fundamentalist by the tunnel vision hyper-euros with their emphasis on chancel prancing and smells and bells. All true Lutherans should now be vigorously opposing the nonsense about God featured in the July 16, 2012 Newsweek and July 23, 2012 TIME. How many of them will even mention these articles? Will the bloggers who read few books and publications as they sit at their computer hour after hour have anything to say or will they continue taking cheap shots vs. CN as John the Steadfast blogger “Dan” did with his “Tushie Kissing” nonsense about the CN editor and Jack Cascione (CN, July 23, 2012, p. 1).