AMDG
A view of Earth from outer space.
Matt Barber is founder and editor-in chief of BarbWire.com. He is an attorney concentrating in constitutional law and holds both a Juris Doctor from Regent University School of Law and a Master of Arts in Public Policy from Regent’s Robertson School of Government.
Matt is both an author and a popular
columnist. He’s known for a unique writing style (an entertaining blend of
thoughtful analysis and Swiftian satire, delivered with a rapier wit). Many
newspapers and online publications run Matt’s columns, to include WND,
TheBlaze, the Washington Times, TownHall and many more. Author of the book,
“The Right Hook: From the Ring to the Culture War,” Matt is currently penning
his first novel.
In addition to frequent public
speaking engagements, Matt has appeared as a cultural analyst on the Fox News
Channel, MSNBC and CNN and is a regular guest on dozens of talk radio programs
and networks including Michael Savage, the G. Gordon Liddy Show, Dennis Prager,
the Michael Medved Show, the Janet Mefferd Show and others. Matt also co-hosts
“Faith and Freedom” a daily legal and cultural issues talk radio program heard
on about 90 stations across the country.
Matt served twelve years in the Army
National Guard, was a law enforcement officer for three years and a corporate
fraud investigator for five years.
Setting him apart from others in his
various fields, Matt was an undefeated heavyweight professional boxer retiring
in 2004. Prior to turning pro, he was a several time state and regional Golden
Gloves champion, competing in the 1992 Western Olympic Trials and winning a
Gold Medal in the 1993 Police and Fire World Games.
The Big Bang and God
They say
there are no atheists in the foxhole.
Even fewer
when death is certain.
None once
the final curtain falls.
God’s Word
declares, “The fool hath said in his heart ‘there is no God'” (Psalm 14).
For three
decades, until his death in 1953, Josef Stalin was the mass-murdering atheist
dictator of Soviet Russia.
He was
also a fool.
In
his 1994 book, “Can Man Live Without God?,” famed Christian apologist Ravi
Zacharias recounts a story he heard firsthand from British Journalist Malcomb
Muggeridge “that stirred [him] then and still does even yet.”
Muggeridge
had collaborated with Svetlana Stalin, Josef Stalin’s daughter, on a BBC
documentary about her God-hating father. She recounted his last act of defiant
rebellion against the Creator: “[A]s Stalin lay dying, plagued with terrifying
hallucinations, he suddenly sat halfway up in bed, clenched his fist toward the
heavens once more, fell back upon his pillow, and was dead.” “His one last gesture,” observed Zacharias,
“was a clenched fist toward God, his heart as cold and hard as steel.”
In
my experience it is something common among atheists: an inexplicable,
incongruent and visceral hatred for the very God they imagine does not exist.
Indeed,
Romans 1:20 notes, “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and
divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the
world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” Yet excuses they make.
Psalm
19:1 likewise observes: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies
proclaim the work of his hands.”
The
manifest intentionality and fine-tuning of all creation reveals design of
breathtaking complexity. The Creator is of incalculable intelligence and infinite
splendor. As I see it, atheism provides a case study in willful suspension of
disbelief – all to escape, as the God-denier imagines it, accountability for
massaging the libertine impulse.
“Wouldn’t
the atheist ‘suspend belief’?” you might ask.
No, the phrase is properly “suspension of disbelief.” It is defined as
“a willingness to suspend one’s critical faculties and believe the
unbelievable; sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment.”
In
the case of the atheist, or the “freethinker,” as they paradoxically prefer,
that which is unbelievable is that somehow everything came from nothing – that
there is no uncaused first cause; that God does not exist, even as knowledge of
His being is indelibly written on every human heart and proved by all He has
made.
Be
they theist, atheist or anti-theist, on this nearly all scientists agree: In
the beginning there was nothing. There was no time, space or matter. There
wasn’t even emptiness, only nothingness. Well, nothing natural anyway.
Then:
bang! Everything. Nonexistence became existence. Nothing became, in less than
an instant, our inconceivably vast and finely tuned universe governed by what
mankind would later call – after we, too, popped into existence from nowhere,
fully armed with conscious awareness and the ability to think, communicate and
observe – “natural law” or “physics.”
Time,
space, earth, life and, finally, human life were not. And then they were.
Writing
in the Wall Street Journal, Christian author Eric Metaxas notes, “The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet
is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at
all. For example, astrophysicists now know that the values of the four
fundamental forces – gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the ‘strong’ and
‘weak’ nuclear forces – were determined less than one-millionth of a second
after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For
instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic
force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction – by even
one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000 – then no stars could have ever formed at
all. Feel free to gulp. … It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up
heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really?”
Secular
materialists claim it can’t be – that such explanation is a “God of the gaps”
explanation and, therefore, must be banished from the realm of scientific
inquiry. They demand that anything beyond the known natural is off-limits.
Atheists attribute all of existence to, well, nothing. It just kind of
happened. Genesis 1:1 of the materialist bible might read: “In the beginning nothing
created the heavens and the earth.” Even in the material world that’s just
plain silly. Nothing plus nothing equals something? Zero times zero equals
everything?
And
so, they have “reasoned” themselves into a corner. These same materialists
acknowledge that, prior to the moment of singularity – the Big Bang – there was
no “natural.” They admit that there was an unnatural time and place before
natural time and space – that something, sometime, somewhere preceded the
material universe. That which preceded the natural was, necessarily, “beyond
the natural” and, therefore, was, is and forever shall be “supernatural.”
Reader,
meet God. In short: the Big Bang blows
atheism sky high.
Fred
Hoyle is the atheist astronomer who coined the term “Big Bang.” He once
confessed that his disbelief was “greatly shaken” by the undisputed science,
writing that “a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a
super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and
biology.”
Albert
Einstein, who is often dishonestly characterized as having been an atheist,
agreed that God-denial is foolishness. He once said of non-believers: “The
fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their
chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who –
in their grudge against traditional religion as the ‘opium of the masses’ –
cannot hear the music of the spheres.”
“I’m
not an atheist,” added Einstein. “The problem involved is too vast for our
limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library
filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written
those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in
which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the
arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is
the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the
universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly
understand these laws.”
Illustrious
NASA scientist (and agnostic) Dr. Robert Jastrow (1925-2008) put it this way:
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story
ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to
conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is
greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
Yes,
with time and chance, even science may eventually catch up to God’s Word.
Matt Barber is founder and editor-in-chief of BarbWire.com. He is an author, columnist, cultural analyst and an
attorney concentrating in constitutional law. Having retired as an undefeated
heavyweight professional boxer, Matt has taken his fight from the
ring to the culture war. (Follow Matt on Twitter: @jmattbarber).
APPENDIX
The Father of the Big
Bang Theory
Did you know that the Father of the Big Bang Theory was a Catholic priest? Read the following review of Episode 2 of the DVD series, The Mystery of God By Bishop Robert Barron. Fr. Georges Lemaître is the father of the Big Bang Theory. Albert Einstein was at first skeptical, but later commended him. Below are some photos of him lecturing and with Einstein. The photos are part of the summary of one of our Catholic Newman Club meetings at the University of Rio Grande. My wife Jaga and I are its advisers.
Ep. 2: St. Thomas Aquinas & the Paths to God
“The Paths to God” was
formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas as five arguments without the use of the Bible
or revelation, using the world around us. He said that nothing in
this world contains in itself the reason for its own
existence. Things are, but don’t have to be or
exist. Everything in this world is contingent or dependent upon
something else, a cause. And that cause is contingent upon a set of
other causes which in turn is contingent upon even more
causes. Finally one must come to a reality whose nature is “to
be”…….Ipsum esse – the sheer act of being itself or to be in itself…….in other
words, God. That’s why in Exodus 3:14, God identified Himself to
Moses as “I am who I am” And Christ could say to the Jews: “Before Abraham was,
I am” (John 8:58).
The Big Bang. For
example, this summary of Bishop Barron’s talk is contingent upon me…….my doing
it. I am contingent upon being a college professor, which is
contingent upon my education, which is contingent upon my parents, who are
caused by their parents, etc., etc. They are all contingent or
dependent upon matter, which goes back to the “Big Bang” that originated at a
point. The theory of the origin of our expanding universe with the “Big Bang”,
now commonly accepted, was formulated by a Belgian Catholic priest, Fr. Georges
Lemaître in 1927 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre). He saw the
big bang as a creation like event and saw no conflict between science and
theology although he avoided mixing up the two. The first photo below
shows two great physicists: Fr. Georges Lemaitre and Albert Einstein.
In the top photo Fr. Georges Lemaitre and Albert Einstein at a scientific meeting. In the second photo the Jesuit priest scientist delivers a lecture.
The Human Mind. According to
Bernard Lonergan and Karl Rahner, Jesuit theologians, both born in 1904 and
died in 1984, postulated that the human mind asks questions, gathers knowledge,
and ultimately seeks God, the glorious mystery. St. Augustine
observed: “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless
until it finds its rest in thee.”
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