You know, for 27 years, I was an atheist. I thought, anyone who believed in a God or
Gods was, well, stupid -- or uneducated -- naïve, gullible, or just into the gig for money,
sex, and power. I mean, after all, everyone knows that religion is just a psychological
crutch for intellectual weaklings, right? So, what changed my mind?
Well look, I tell the whole story in my book Shattered, but for our purposes here on Prager
University, I was simply challenged by my Christian teammates on the Cincinnati Reds
to read some religious books, critique them, and then share with the guys where the authors
were wrong, and why atheism is the only real and true outlook for anyone not deceived by
fantasy, fiction, or mythology.
I mean, for someone who wants to base their beliefs and values upon evidence and argument,
not emotion and tradition. Now look, simply put, I set out to disprove theism, which I
didn't think would take very long, but I ran into some difficulties along the way. Difficulties
like: Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas. I mean, in simple terms, I was confronted with the
awareness that there are really four big bangs that have to be accounted for, not just one.
I had never even really considered that before.
We're all familiar with the first big bang, right? It's usually the answer given to the
question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" It's the idea that there was nothing,
it popped, and -- boom! -- there's something! I mean, that time, matter and space all came
into existence in some great cosmological flash about 16 billion years ago. There was
no gradual development, no transitional forms, just a binary flip -- a metaphysical, now
you don't see it, and now you do. Fine, I want to follow the evidence wherever it leads.
However, astrophysicists tell us that this first big bang yielded only a handful of fundamental
elements, and that it would take billions and billions of years for the nuclear furnaces
of trillions of stars to yield the 118 elements in the periodic table.
But the first theoretical cosmological big bang, well, it only yields matter and energy.
It doesn't even begin to address the origin of life. So, how do you get life from non-life?
How did abiogenesis occur? I mean, the notion that something can come from nothing. Where's
the evidence?
Well, you're going to need another something-from-nothing leap of faith, some kind of biological, second
big bang. For all the mind-blowing advancements we've made in physicis, biology, and chemistry
in just the past 100 years, we're still no closer to making it happen. We don't have
a clue. The closer we look, the wider the chasm.
I mean, sure, we've learned a lot about how to manipulate life forms, how to add and subtract
DNA material, even map the human genome, but we have no idea how to literally create life
from dead stuff. Now look, at this point we still only have physics, chemistry, and some
basic biology -- or matter, energy, and simple life, if you will.
But we still don't have a way to account for the great diversity of life forms, I mean,
the huge differences between bacteria, plants and animals. Nor do we have a way to account
for the differences between man and animal. We still don't have an anthropology at this
point.
So, we're going to need a kind of anthropological third big bang to account for all this, which
is of course what Darwin was after in his "Descent of Man" thesis. Now look, Darwin
answered a lot of questions, but he could never answer the core question: How did evolution
begin?
But hey, we're still not done describing the world that is all around us. A final big bang
is going to be required to explain how a mechanistic animal brain can become a self-reflective
human mind. Even the lowest life forms have brains and central nervous systems. I mean,
how does something like that become the mind of a Michelangelo, a Shakespeare, a Beethoven?
Come on, animals don't do art, and they don't appreciate beauty.
But the problem is even more basic than that. How do you account for free will and introspection,
let alone man's pressing existential drive to ask, "why?" Well we're going to need some
kind of psychological 4th big bang to account for man's moral and esthetic sense -- his
search for meaning, significance, and purpose, and of course his appreciation for the true,
the good, and the beautiful. And again, you must understand, these problems require bangs--I
mean, sudden binary pops into existence, since there's no evidence for any gradual developments
in any of these.
So, I, like you, have a choice. It's either faith in these four big bangs of "somethings
from nothings" to account for what we see all around us, or faith in some kind of creator
God behind it all. So, next time someone asks you "Hey, what about the big bang?" make sure
to ask them: "Which one? The cosmological, biological, anthropological, or psychological?"
I'm Frank Pastore for Prager University.