Medieval Muslim scholars developed one of the most famous versions of the cosmological argument, known as the Kalām argument. It asserted that the universe had a temporal beginning — a proposition that philosophers typically sought to justify by showing the logical or mathematical absurdity of an infinite regress of cause and effect. The argument concluded that the beginning of the physical universe must have resulted from an uncaused first cause that exists independently of the universe. The argument was typically expressed in a syllogism:

[The American Heritage Dictionary defines a syllogigism as a form of deductive reasoning consisting of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion; for example, All humans are mortal, the major premise, I am a human, the minor premise, therefore, I am mortal, the conclusion. In the case of the Kalām argument, the syllogism is this]

Whatever begins to exist must have a cause.

The universe began to exist.

The universe must have had a cause for its existence.

By further steps of reasoning, proponents of the Kalām argument deduced that the necessary first cause of the universe must transcend the physical universe (since a cause is necessarily separate from its effects) and must be personal (since only a personal agent can act discretely to initiate a new line of causation without its action being caused by a prior set of necessary and sufficient material conditions). Finally, proponents of the Kalām argument equated that first transcendent and personal cause with God.

I have taken this quote from Stephen Meyer’s book The Return of the God Hypothesis.

Are you still an unbeliever? Not convinced by the abductive logic I presented in my recent parts of this series, coupled with the additional tool of comparing the explanatory power of competing hypotheses sometimes called "inference to the best explanation".

Well let me take you to another scientific proof. This is a gift from Thomas Bayes, our 18th Century clergyman. Certainly being a clergyman fits in very nicely with this topic. But more relevant to the question of scientific proof, for those unbelievers, is the other hat that Mr Bayes wore – that of a mathematician and what his method can tell us about whether the creation of information for life is more likely to have been given by an intelligent designer – or multiple accidents.

Tag words: Kalām argument; Stephen Meyer; The Return of the God Hypothesis; inference to the best explanation; Thomas Bayes; intelligent designer; God; method of multiple competing hypotheses; DNA; Bayesian analysis; causal adequacy; posterior probability; Bayesian probability; Einstein’s Theory of Relativity; Alister McGrath; The Twilight of Atheism; Richard Dawkins; science proves things; Neo-Darwinists; Darwin’s Theory of Evolution; Stephen Jay Gould; John Lennox; God’s Undertaker; David Raup; big bang; cosmic microwave background radiation; CMBR; steady state;

What science has just learned about the history of life on earth is a result entirely unexpected by atheist scientists. It doesn’t give the appearance Richard Dawkins ascribed to the universe of no design, no purpose . . . nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. Instead Stephen Meyer, in his book The Return of the God Hypothesis, wrote:

the information problem associated with the origin of the first life does not represent an isolated anomaly, but instead a fundamental challenge to theories of chemical and biological evolution. Indeed, repeated abrupt appearances of new biological form and information in the history of life are not at all what we should expect to observe if a purely materialistic evolutionary process lacking "design" and "purpose" was at work. Instead, if a purposive intelligence had acted periodically during the history of life on earth, we might well expect — given our experience of intelligent agents generating information — to find evidence of episodic bursts of new information in the biosphere.

What did those scientists who follow the evidence where it leads, who don’t have a committed and unmovable worldview of the universe, that will acknowledge an intelligent designer outside the universe if that’s where the evidence leads, find when they looked at the incredibly complex information in life and found, as well, the sudden emergence of entirely new life forms. A designed Rhythm of life wasn’t what people like Dawkins expected or would acknowledge even when the evidence was overwhelming.

Tag words: Science; Richard Dawkins; Stephen Meyer; The Return of the God Hypothesis; design; purpose; intelligent designer; Neo-Darwinism; DNA; three-dimensional  protein folds; Douglas Axe; amino acids; intelligent agency; Henry Quastler; specified information; macroevolutionary innovation; function-ready; Darwin's Doubt; Cambrian explosion; acts of mind; novel information; Genetic algorithms; Bernd-Olaf Küppers; target sequence; unguided evolutionary mechanisms;

In the Origin of Species, Darwin depicted the history of life as a gradually unfolding, branching tree, with the trunk representing the first one-celled organisms and the branches representing all the species that evolved from these first forms. In this view, novel animal and plant species arose from a series of simpler precursors and intermediate forms over vast stretches of geologic time. Darwin argued vigorously for this view. At the same time, he acknowledged that the sudden appearance of many major groups of organisms in the fossil record did not fit easily into his picture of gradual evolutionary change.

So Stephen Meyer writes in his book, Return of the God Hypothesis.

This is what Charles Darwin wrote in his book Origin of Species, Chapter IX, “On the Imperfection of the Geological Record”:

There is another and allied difficulty, which is much graver. I allude to the manner in which numbers of species of the same group, suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks .... To the question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer.

He wrote this in 1859. In the following nearly 175 years no fossil evidence, of the kind that Darwin expected to emerge in overwhelming abundance, has ever been found. His theory about the emergence of new species was wrong on day one and it has never been validated.

Tag words: Origin of Species; Charles Darwin; Stephen Meyer; Return of the God Hypothesis; natural selection; macromutations; missing ancestral fossils; God; Genesis; creation; universe; Darwin's Doubt; neo-Darwinism; DNA molecule; chemical evolutionary theory; explosions of new genetic information; evolutionary biology; Richard Dawkins; Eugenie Scott; neo-Darwinism; Michael Denton; Evolution: A Theory in Crisis; new genetic information; random mutations; David Berlinski; The Deniable Darwin;

At the very beginning of this series I opened with the words Carl Sagan spoke, in the opening of his spectacularly successful 1970 TV series, Cosmos. His entire philosophy reduced to just 13 words:

the cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.

But that was clearly untrue. Stephen Hawkings proved it wasn’t true when he proved that the universe came from what is called a singularity – or as the ancient Romans would have expressed it ex nihilo – from nothing. Or as the Book of Genesis described it – 

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Stephen Hawking was later to recoil in horror from what he had done, just as Dr Frankenstein did when he gave life to his monster – but more of that for another programme.

Yet the science of the materialists and naturalists dishonestly says that it’s clear that everything about our universe can be explained in terms of what is in this universe. The universe came from nothing. Edward Tryton, American scientist and Professor emeritus of Physics at Hunter College of the City University of New York and atheist shrugged that off with the quip:

Our universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.

These self same scientists then say, without any sign of self awareness, that nothing can come from nothing – except, apparently everything. So let’s look in that incredibly remote place where materialist scientists refuse to go - outside the universe for a definitive explanation of how everything came into existence – which will be proved to a scientific standard with the help of the 18th Century English clergyman and mathematician by the name of Thomas Bayes.

Tag words: Carl Sagan; Cosmos; Stephen Hawkings; Book of Genesis; God; Edward Tryton; Thomas Bayes; Bayesian; DNA; Stephen Meyer; The Return of the God Hypothesis; Charles Darwin; Theory of Evolution; information; Darwinism; Francisco Ayala; Claude Shannon; Shannon information; Francis Crick; Richard Dawkins; Bill Gates; Leroy Hood; RNA; protein; Christian de Duve; intelligent design; Lyell;

Hitler, in his book Mein Kampf, praised one American, and only one American. He described him as the single only great man in that country. He spoke about how the sinister tentacles of the Jewish world conspiracy had even reached the New World. These are Hitler’s exact words:

it is not only the Old World that he [the Jew] holds thus enmeshed, the same fate menaces the New. It is Jews who govern the stock exchange forces of the American Union. Every year makes them more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions; only a single great man, Ford, to their fury, still maintains full independence.

High praise indeed and sadly, I have to say, Henry Ford would have been flattered by Hitler’s comment. As the commentary on my edition of Mein Kampf written by Professor Cameron Watt, of London University, wrote Henry Ford was himself a bitter anti-semite with his own paper, the Dearborn Independant.

Taking a different tack to Henry Ford to the one that the Führer had taken, John Lennox, in his book God’s Undertaker, looked at Henry Ford’s because of his invention of his famous car, as if he was God. What if God was one of us? An interesting idea but one I think that’s already been done.

Tag words: Adolf Hitler; Mein Kampf; Henry Ford; Professor Cameron Watt; John Lennox; God’s Undertaker; God; Pierre-Simon; Marquis de Laplace; Napoleon; Austin Farrer; Sir Isaac Newton;Richard Dawkins; Michael Poole; Peter Atkins; DNA; Professor Dean Kenyon; Biochemical Predestination; Stephen Meyer; The Return of the God Hypothesis; Bill Gates; Microsoft Corporation; Kenneth Miller; intelligent design; Charles Sanders Peirce; Richard Feynman; Stephen Hawkings; deduction; abduction; inference to the best explanation;

… we  would in all likelihood deduce on visiting a remote planet if we found a succession of piles of perfect cubes of titanium with a prime number of cubes in each pile in ascending order — 2,3,5,7,11, etc. We would see at once that here was an artefact produced by an intelligent agent, even though we had no idea what kind of intelligent agent it could possibly be. The piles of cubes are in themselves much 'simpler' than the intelligence that made them, but that fact does not prevent our deduction of intelligent origin as a reasonable inference to the best explanation. We instinctively infer 'upwards' to an ultimately intelligent causation rather than 'downwards' to chance and necessity.

So wrote John Lennox in his book God’s Undertaker. And who would disagree?

Tag words: John Lennox; God’s Undertaker; SETI; Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence; Carl Sagan; Contact; Richard Dawkins; DNA; inference to the best explanation; Massimo Pigliucci; Christian de Duve; Judge Jones; Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District; naturalism; God of the Gaps; Pierre-Simon Laplace; Napoleon;

An anonymous person, once jokingly remarked:

One of the main evidences that there is intelligent life out there is that it has not tried to contact us!

Or as Monty Python put it in their Galaxy Song

“pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth”

We now know, thanks to advances in science, that every living thing has its own operating system. And those operating systems are extraordinarily complex. Even the operating system of the simplest cell. To function at all, and more importantly properly, the operating system needs the right information. The question that materialist scientists (atheist) can’t answer is where that information came from. Stephen Meyer says that it comes from outside the universe – from an intelligent designer. And he says he can prove that to a scientific standard. So I’m giving to give him a shot to do just that.

And so we begin...

Tag words: Stephen Meyer; The Return of the God Hypothesis; John Lennox; God’s Undertaker; Plato; Socrates; Anthony Flew; God; David Hume; Christianity; miracles; Big Bang; universe; singularity; worldview; Charles Sanders Peirce; abduction; abductive inferences; Copernicus; heliocentric theory of the solar system; Galileo; Napoleon Bonaparte; inference to the best explanation; method of multiple competing hypotheses;

Bill Bryson, in his book, The Body - A Guide for Occupants tells us:

Your cells are a country of ten thousand trillion citizens, each devoted in some intensively specific way to your overall well-being. There isn't a thing they don't do for you. They let you feel pleasure and form thoughts. They enable you to stand and stretch and caper. When you eat, they extract the nutrients, distribute the energy, and carry off the wastes — all those things you learned about in school biology — but they also remember to make you hungry in the first place and reward you with a feeling of well-being afterwards so that you won't forget to eat again. They keep your hair growing, your ears waxed, your brain quietly purring. They manage every corner of your being. They will jump to your defence the instant you are threatened. They will unhesitatingly die for you — billions of them do so daily. And not once in all your years have you thanked even one of them. So let us take a moment now to regard them with the wonder and appreciation they deserve.

All of those things that your body does for you is through using the information in your DNA RNA and proteins that reports to your body what it needs to know, what to do, when to do it and how to do it. And as I said before atheists and Christians both agree on that biological stuff of what your body does. What secular scientists and Christian scientists don’t agree on is where your body got that information from? So would you like to know?

Tag words: Bill Bryson; The Body - A Guide for Occupants; DNA; Richard Dawkins; The Blind Watchmaker; Stephen Meyer; The Return of the God Hypothesis; Bill Gates; Watson and Crick; Francis Crick; Charles Darwin; John Lennox; God’s Undertaker; Leslie Orgel; DNA enigma; Peter Lipton; Charles Lyell; Henry Quastler; Hubert Yockey; Dembski; Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence; SETI; Carl Sagan; Human Genome Project; Francis Collins; Gene Myers; Bible;

In 1994, biologist and textbook writer, Kenneth Miller wrote:

The human genome is littered with pseudo-genes [DNA sequences thought to have lost a function they once had], gene fragments, 'orphaned' genes, 'junk' DNA, and so many repeated copies of pointless DNA sequences that it cannot be attributed to anything that resembles intelligent design. If the DNA of a human being or any other organism resembled a carefully constructed computer program, with neatly arranged and logically structured modules each written to fulfill a specific function, the evidence of intelligent design would be overwhelming. In fact, the genome resembles nothing so much as a hodgepodge of borrowed, copied, mutated, and discarded sequences and commands that has been cobbled together by millions of years of trial and error against the relentless test of survival.This was the assertion that was the basis of Richard Dawkins 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. If 97% of DNA was junk DNA, nothing more than a parasite as Dawkins called that 97%, then that unequivocally proved that evolution was the unintelligent, unguided way life advanced not the nonsense of an old bearded man in the sky doing brilliant design work as our loving creator God. But Kenneth Miller and Richard Dawkins were getting ahead of themselves. That wasn’t the last word on the subject – what came next should have entirely turned them around to accepting an intelligent God – but no surprises, when most secular atheists are proven to have gotten it wrong, they kick the can down the road and invent a new reason why they’re still right.

Tag words: Kenneth Miller; DNA; junk DNA; Richard Dawkins; The Selfish Gene; God; Walter Isaacson; The Code Breaker; Jennifer Doudna; Jack Szostak; Human Genome Project; Jonathon Wells; Zombie Science; Philip Kitcher; ENCODE; EN-Cyclopedia Of DNA Elements; RNA; Long Interspersed Nuclear Elements; LINEs; Short Interspersed Nuclear Elements; SINEs; Dan Graur; W Ford Doolittle; Alexander Palazzo; T Ryan Gregory; Arthur Keith; Edward Larson; Summer for the Gods; John William Draper; Andrew Dickson White; History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science; A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom; Galileo; Giordano Bruno; James Orr; Science and Faith;

The Jurassic Park series of movies tells the story of human beings using existing living genetic material as the basis for substantially recreating long extinct dinosaurs. It’s purely fictional, but scientifically this is possible. But the huge advantage there is that they’re working with life that already exists.

RNA World – the theory advanced by atheist scientists to show that life could happen without God, is less likely to be able to happen. They have to show that life could begin without God. How is that going for them?

Tag words: Jurassic Park; RNA World; God; Richard Dawkins; DNA; Stephen Meyer; Return of the God Hypothesis; Aleksandr I. Oparin; Theodosius Dobzhansky; Christian de Duve; RNA; Walter Isaacson; The Code Breaker; proteins; Francis Crick; little green men; Walter Gilbert; John Lennox; God’s Undertaker; human genome; single nucleotide polymorphisms; SNPs; Snips; Psalm 139; Jonathon Wells; Zombie Science; junk DNA; Susumu Ohno; W. Ford Doolittle; Carmen Sapienza; Leslie Orgel;