By Auguste Meyrat.

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Now for today's column...

If you consider the evolution of Christian apologetics over the centuries, most of the changes pertain to style and format. In the early days, apologists would deliver their arguments at forums or write letters on papyrus scrolls. In the Middle Ages, they would have formal debates or write lengthy, abstruse treatises on vellum. In the modern era, apologists have made use of radio, popular literature, television, and now the Internet to explain why Christianity is the one true faith.

As for the actual substance of Christian apologetics, not much has changed since the days of St. Justin Martyr. Many of today's arguments are the same as those articulated centuries ago. After all, if they haven't been disproven (and they haven't), there's little reason to develop new ones.

By contrast, opponents of Christianity are continually forced to reframe and reconstruct their arguments. These days, atheists prefer to invoke science in the effort to prove God doesn't exist. This, in turn, forces Christian apologists to adapt by speaking extensively on the sciences while articulating the same perennial points.

This approach is apparent in Science at the Doorstep of God: Science in Support of God, the Soul, and Life After Death (2023) by American scientist, philosopher, professor, and priest Robert Spitzer, S.J.

Spitzer systematically dismantles and debunks the supposedly scientific arguments of today's skeptics. In addition to proving God's existence, he also demonstrates that the old arguments are more relevant than ever, and that they even may prove necessary in saving scientific inquiry itself from materialist nihilism.

At the outset, Spitzer explains how modern physics and astronomy point to a beginning to the universe (with the "Big Bang") and how this important truth necessitates an immaterial God. This also addresses the usual atheist rebuttals that the universe is somehow one of an infinite set of universes (a multiverse) - for which no evidence exists.

These theories also conflict with the current expansion of the universe and the law of entropy. Seen differently, they are ideas that effectively trade away the conclusions supported by millennia of scientific and mathematical scholarship for the kinds of implausible narratives typically found in a superhero movie.

The same back-and-forth applies with the "fine-tuning" argument. Spitzer relates how the many variables that allow the universe to exist and sustain life (low energy, universal constants, the mass of fundamental particles) are so finely "tuned" that such a system arising randomly is virtually impossible.

There is also "string theory," which proposes a potentially infinite series of alternative dimensional universes, and a "Level IV multiverse," which claims that an unchangeable series of physical laws precedes the creation of the cosmos. Yet, again, none of these alternative theories are based on any real science, but rather stem from a deep atheistic prejudice with a science-sounding vocabulary.

Spitzer responds to an argument made popular by the famous atheist Richard Dawkins. A philosopher/scientist himself, Dawkins proposes the following syllogism: "1. Whatever is more complex is more improbable. 2. A cosmic designer (God) must be more complex than anything it designs. 3. Therefore, a cosmic designer must be more improbable than anything it designs."

Spitzer explains that not only does Dawkins have this backwards (in truth, God, at least in Christian theology, is "simple" and thus more probable than any designed reality). But Dawkins also misapplies and misunderstands science itself.

All the sciences are based on induction (forming conclusions from observed phenomena), not deducti...