atheism | Craig T. Owens

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Links & Quotes

February 24, 2015 — Craig T. Owens

Open Door USA reports that Christian persecution around the world has never been worse than it is now. We must pray!!

Here is a cool story about how God used some praying Christians to save a young girl from sex trafficking.

J. Warner Wallace says, “When [Richard] Dawkins and [Sam] Harris say we, as Christians, believe in something for which there is no supporting evidence, they simply betray their ignorance about the nature of evidence and the way in which detectives and prosecutors build cases.” Check out his post on the evidence that supports the Christian worldview.

Frank Viola has an encouraging word. He says, “If God has called you to a specific work, there is a time in which that work will find its greatest fulfillment and its widest impact.” Please read Your Time Has Not Yet Come.

“Angels might have wept as they saw the folly of men who sought anything except the Lord, Who alone can make a house His temple; Who alone can make a ministry to be a ministration of mercy; without Whose presence the most solemn congregation is but as the herding of men in the market, and the most melodious songs but as the shoutings of those who make merry at a marriage. Without the Lord, our solemn days, our new moons, and our appointed feasts, are an abomination such as His soul hates.” —Charles Spurgeon

“Remember always that religious emotion is only a servant.” ―C.S. Lewis

I love this! Like an experience from the Book of Acts is Pastor Saeed Abedini in his Iranian prison.

Craig Gross writes this about Fifty Shades Of Grey, “This is not a love story. This is not even an erotic story. This is a story of broken people continuing a cycle of dysfunction in their lives rather than dealing with their issues.” Read the rest of his post.

Links & Quotes

September 15, 2014 — Craig T. Owens

Some good reading & watching from today…

“The true measure of ministry effectiveness is the extent to which we are able to lead God’s people into greater love for Him and His Kingdom.” —T.M. Moore

“Tragedy is that our attention centers on what people are not, rather than on what they are and who they might become.” —Brennan Manning

“The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.” —Mother Teresa

“Holiness is not the luxury of the few; it is a simple duty, for you and for me.” —Mother Teresa

“The devil does not need to bother about us as long as we remain ignorant of the way God has made us and refuse to discipline ourselves; inattention and our own slovenliness will soon run away with every power we have.” —Oswald Chambers

“There is something which we can do which God does. He does good to all His creatures, and we can do good also. He bears witness to His Son Jesus, and we can bear witness too.” —Charles Spurgeon

[VIDEO] Ken Davis always cracks me up. Check out this clip Arm Vs. Airbag.

Why do people get so annoyed over anything that looks “religious” to them. For people who claim God doesn’t exist, atheists get awfully mad at Him!

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: atheism, atheist, Brennan Manning, Charles Spurgeon, church, comedy, discipline, effectiveness, God's love, Jesus Christ, Ken Davis, lazy, loneliness, love, ministry, Mother Teresa, Oswald Chambers, personal holiness, poverty, quotes, selfless, T.M. Moore, video, witness. Leave a Comment »

12 Noteworthy Quotes From “There Is A God”

July 18, 2014 — Craig T. Owens

As I said in my book review of Anthony Flew’s There Is A God, the real value of this book is in the arguments which contributed to Flew’s shift from atheism to theism. You can read my full book review by clicking here.

Frankly, it’s hard to share a lot of the quotes because the context of the full argument would be lacking, but I’ve been sharing a few of them over several posts. To wrap up this series, here are several other noteworthy quotes from this thought-provoking book.

“I would have liked to convince my father that I had found what he had been looking for, the ineffable something he had longed for all his life. I would have liked to persuade him that the search for God does not have to be in vain. But it was hopeless. He had known too many blind Christians, bleak moralists who sucked the joy from life and persuaded their opponents; he would never have been able to see the truth they were hiding.” —Katherine Tait, daughter of Bertrand Russell

“Nothing can penetrate the loneliness of the human heart except the highest intensity of the sort of love the religious teachers have preached.” —Bertrand Russell

“In sum, to the Being who he considered to be the explanation of the world and its broad form, Aristotle ascribed the following attributes: immutability, immateriality, omnipotence, omniscience, oneness or indivisibility, perfect goodness and necessary existence. There is an impressive correspondence between this set of attributes and those traditionally ascribed to God within the Judaeo-Christian tradition. It is one that fully justifies us in viewing Aristotle as having had the same Divine Being in mind as the cause of the world that is the object of worship of these two religions.” —David Conway

“There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other. … Religion and natural science are fighting the joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against skepticism and against dogmatism, against unbelief and superstition … and therefore ‘On to God!’” —Max Planck

“God is a mathematician of a very high order and He used advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.” —Paul A.M. Dirac

“Reason tells me of the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capability of looking far backwards and far into the futurity, as a result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of mine; and I deserve to be called a Theist.” —Charles Darwin

“Science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview. … Even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith the existence of a lawlike order in nature that is at least in part comprehensible to us.” —Paul Davies, Templeton Prize winner

“It is crazy to postulate a trillion (casually unconnected) universes to explain the features of one universe, when postulating one entity (God) will do the job.” —Richard Swinburne

“The problem of how meaningful or semantic information can emerge spontaneously from a collection of mindless molecules subject to blind and purposeless forces percents a deep conceptual challenge.” —Paul Davies

“One feature of life, though, remains certain: Life could not have evolved without a genetic mechanism—one able to store, replicate, and transmit to its progeny information that can change with time. … Precisely how the first genetic machinery involved also persists as an unresolved issue.” —Antonia Lazcano

“The world is rational. The order of the world reflects the order of the supreme mind governing it.” —Kurt Gödel

“The reality of rationality cannot be evaded with any appeal to natural selection. Natural selection presupposes the existence of physical entities that interact according to specific laws and of a code that manages the processes of life. And to talk of natural selection is to assume that there is some logic to what is happening in nature (adaptation) and that we are capable of understanding this logic.” —Roy Abraham Varghese

You can read some direct quotes from Anthony Flew by clicking here.
Some Albert Einstein quotes can be found by clicking here.
A fascinating mathematical explanation from Gerald Schroeder is found by clicking here.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: Anthony Flew, Aristotle, atheism, atheist, Bertrand Russell, book review, Charles Darwin, Christianity, Creator, DNA, faith, logic, mathematics, Max Planck, natural selection, Paul A.M. Dirac, philosophy, quotes, rationality, reason, science. Leave a Comment »

A Mathematical Quote From Gerald Schroeder In “There Is A God”

July 14, 2014 — Craig T. Owens

Frankly, it’s hard to share a lot of the quotes because the context of the full argument would be lacking, but I’ve been sharing a few of them over several posts. To continue, here is an extensive quote from mathematician Gerald Schroeder, which is set up by a quote from Anthony Flew.

“Schroeder first referred to an experiment conducted by the British National Council of Arts. A computer was placed in a cage with six monkeys. After one month of hammering away at it (as well as using it as a bathroom!), The monkeys produced fifty typed pages—but not a single word. Schroeder noted that this was the case even though the shortest word in the English language is one letter (a or I). A is a word only if there is a space on either side of it. If we take it that the keyboard has thirty characters (the twenty-six letters and other symbols), then the likelihood of getting a one-letter word is 30 times 30 times 30, which is 27,000. The likelihood of getting a one-letter word is one chance out of 27,000. Schroeder then applied the probabilities to the sonnet analogy. ‘What’s the chance of getting a Shakespearean sonnet?’ he asked. He continued:

‘All the sonnets are the same length. They are by definition fourteen lines long. I picked the one I knew the opening line for, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” I counted the number of letters; there are 488 letters in that sonnet. What’s the likelihood of hammering away and getting 488 letters in the exact sequence as in “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” What you end up with is 26 multiplied by itself 488 times—or 26 to the 488th power. Or, in other words, in base 10, 10 to the 690th.

‘Now the number of particles in the universe—not grains of sand, I am talking about protons, electrons, and neutrons—is 10 to the 80th. Ten to the 80th is one with 80 zeros after it. Ten to the 690 is one with 690 zeros after it. There are not enough particles in the universe to write down the trials; you’d be off by a factor of 10 to the 600th.

‘If you took the entire universe and converted it to computer chips—forget the monkeys—each one weighing a millionth of a gram and had each computer chip able to spin out 488 trials at, say, one million times a second; if you turn the entire universe into these microcomputer chips and these chips were spinning a million times a second producing random letters, the number of trials you would get since the beginning of time would be 10 to the 90th trials. It would be off again by a factor of 10 to the 600th. You will never get a sonnet by chance. The universe would have to be 10 to the 600 times larger. Yet the world just thinks the monkeys can do it every time.’”

More quotes are forthcoming.
You can read some direct quotes from Anthony Flew by clicking here.
Some Albert Einstein quotes can be found by clicking here.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: Anthony Flew, apologetic, atheism, atheist, book review, computer, Gerald Schroeder, monkey, probability, quotes, Shakespeare. 13 Comments »

5 Quotes From Albert Einstein In “There Is A God”

July 12, 2014 — Craig T. Owens

Frankly, it’s hard to share a lot of the quotes because the context of the full argument would be lacking, but I’ve begun sharing some of them over several posts. To continue, below are some quotes from Albert Einstein.

“I am not a positivist. Positivism states that what cannot be observed does not exist. This conception is scientifically indefensible, for it is impossible to make valid affirmations of what people ‘can’ or ‘cannot’ observe. One would have to say ‘only what we observe exists,’ which is obviously false.” —Albert Einstein

“The man of science is a poor philosopher.” —Albert Einstein

“I want to know how God created this world. … I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.” —Albert Einstein

“I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. 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. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.” —Albert Einstein

“Every one who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of men, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.” —Albert Einstein

More quotes are forthcoming. You can read some direct quotes from Anthony Flew by clicking here.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: Albert Einstein, Anthony Flew, apologetic, atheism, atheist, book review, Creation, Creator, humility, pantheism, philosophy, quantum physics, quotes, science. 2 Comments »

5 Quotes From Anthony Flew In “There Is A God”

July 9, 2014 — Craig T. Owens

Frankly, it’s hard to share a lot of the quotes because the context of the full argument would be lacking, but I’m going to attempt to share some of them in multiple posts. To start with, below are some of the direct quotes from Anthony Flew.

“I have said in some of my later atheist writings that I reached the conclusion about the nonexistence of God much too quickly, much too easily, and for what later seemed to me the wrong reasons. I reconsidered this negative conclusion at length and often, but for nearly seventy years thereafter I never found the grounds sufficient to warrant any fundamental reversal. One of those early reasons for my conversion to atheism was the problem of evil.”

“The presumption of atheism can be justified by the inescapable demand for grounds. To believe there is a God, we have to have good grounds for the belief. But if no such grounds are provided, there exists no sufficient reason for believing in God, and the only reasonable position is to be a negative atheist or an agnostic (by negative atheist, I meant ‘a-theist,’ parallel to such words as atypical and amoral). … This argument garnered many and varied responses. Writing as an agnostic, the English philosopher Anthony Kenny maintained that there may be a presumption for agnosticism, but not for positive or negative atheism. He suggested that it takes more effort to show that you know something than that you do not (this includes even the claim that the concept of God is not coherent). But he said this does not let agnostics off the hook; a candidate for an examination may be able to justify the claim that he or she does not know the answer to one of the questions, but this does not enable the person to pass the examination. … By far, the heaviest challenge to the argument came from America. The modal logician Alvin Plantinga introduced the idea that theism is a properly basic belief. He asserted that belief in God is similar to belief in other basic truths, such as belief in other minds or perception (seeing a tree) or memory (belief in the past). In all these instances, you trust your cognitive faculties, although you cannot prove the truth of the belief in question. Similarly, people take certain propositions (e.g., the existence of the world) as basic and others as derivative from these basic propositions. Believers, it is argued, take the existence of God as a basic proposition.”

“If there is an infinite series of books about geometry that owe their pattern to copying from earlier books, we still do not have an adequate answer as to why the book is the way it is (e.g., it is about geometry) or why there is a book at all. The entire series needs an explanation.”

“Science qua science cannot furnish an argument for God’s existence. But the three items of evidence we have considered in this volume—the laws of nature, life with its teleological organization, and the existence of the universe—can only be explained in the light of an Intelligence that explains both its own existence and that of the world.”

“My discovery of the Divine has been a pilgrimage of reason and not of faith.”

Check back soon for some additional quotes from this thought-provoking book.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: Anthony Flew, apologetic, atheism, atheist, book review, faith, philosophy, quotes, reason, science, theism. 1 Comment »

There Is A God (book review)

July 8, 2014 — Craig T. Owens

It’s a mark of a strong, confident person that can admit, “I was wrong. I made a mistake.” Anthony Flew is just such a strong man. His book is called There Is A God: How the world’s most notorious atheist changed his mind.

The one sentence summary of this book could be: Anthony Flew was a noted philosopher who concluded there was no God, but then was persuaded to rethink his position and came to a complete reversal. But that would sell his story short.

The real meat-and-potatoes of the book are the arguments which helped change Anthony Flew’s mind. This, I must warn you, is no easy reading. The arguments are so nuanced and metaphysical at times, that it really requires a careful reading. This was not a book I could speed read, because the chain of logic in the arguments was simply too good to miss anything.

I throughly appreciated the candor with which Flew shared his metamorphosis from atheist to Theist. The book also includes two appendices which address the current state of modern atheism, and an interview with N.T. Wright on Jesus being God Incarnate.

If you are ready to study some of the atheistic and theistic arguments that the brightest apologists for both viewpoints are presenting today, then this is the book for you! I thought the journey of discovery was fantastic and mind-expanding!

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: Anthony Flew, argument, atheism, atheist, autobiography, book review, logic, N.T. Wright, philosophy, scholar. 8 Comments »

Links & Quotes

May 9, 2014 — Craig T. Owens

Some interesting reading I found today.

“The Bible is not a book for the faint of heart—it is a book full of all the greed and glory and violence and tenderness and sex and betrayal that benefits mankind. It is not the collection of pretty little anecdotes mouthed by pious little church mice—it does not so much nibble at our shoe leather as it cuts to the heart and splits the marrow from the bone. It does not give us answers fitted to our small-minded questions, but truth that goes beyond what we even know to ask.” —Rich Mullins

As I have said before, tolerance is only afforded to those who say “anything goes.” Anyone who says there is a right/wrong, truth/lie is labeled intolerant, as illustrated in this story of the Benham brothers losing their TV show deal…

…and to further prove the point, Yahoo Joins Google In Banning Pro-Life Ads.

“It’s pretty obvious… that the Judeo-Christian concept of God held the key to the rise of the West, and that is the belief in a rational Creator God, because that had the implication, then, that the creation was itself rational—that is to say, it obeys rules” (Rodney Stark). Read more in How Christianity Created Science (And Why Atheism Wouldn’t Have).

Detroit Tiger fans (like me!) will enjoy this: A Numerical Guide To The History Of The Detroit Tigers.

“Has the enemy tried to tell you that God has bypassed you? Have you been tempted to conclude that the Lord isn’t with you? Have you almost given up your faith? Put your hope in the Lord’s Word to you: ‘I will never leave you, nor forsake you’ (Hebrews 13:5). ‘The Lord also will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble. And they that know Your name will put their trust in You: for You, Lord, have not forsaken them that seek You’ (Psalm 9:9-10).” —David Wilkerson

“… this inscription from Jerusalem may signal widespread—if elementary—literacy during the time of David and Solomon.” Read more about this archeological discovery in Jerusalem.

“Let us meditate on the Lord’s holy name that we may trust Him the better and rejoice the more readily.” —Charles Spurgeon

7 Quotes From “The Greatest Words Ever Spoken”

March 19, 2014 — Craig T. Owens

Obviously the best quotes from The Greatest Words Ever Spoken are from Jesus Himself. But Steven K. Scott, who complied the words of Christ into this unique format (you may read my book review by clicking here) had some good things to say too.

“No occurrence in history or physical science has been verified with a higher degree of statistical certainty than the fact that Jesus is exactly who He claimed to be—the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

“We cannot worship the Father in spirit or in truth unless we see Him for who He really is and understand His relationship with the Son.”

“Agnostics hold the position that they simply do not know if God exists. Atheists, on the other hand, claim intellectual superiority over all others, saying they know there is no God.”

“If you want to know what God thinks and feels, how He acts and works, what grieves Him and what pleases Him, all you have to do is read the words and observe the behavior of Jesus Christ.”

“Several years ago a string of four letters took the Christian community by storm. It seemed like WWJD, which stands for ‘What would Jesus do?’ was everywhere—and why not? When a choice has to be made, is any other question more important to ask? The answer is ‘Yes, one question is more important. One question Christians should ask before choosing any course of action, making any spiritual decision, or adopting any value or belief.’ That question is ‘WDJS: what did Jesus say?’ This is the question Christians need to ask because in many situations we simply can’t know for sure what Jesus would do, so we are left to figure it out for ourselves. And figuring it out may require more wisdom, revelation, insight, and spiritual maturity than we possess at the time. … Jesus made more statements about how His followers should live and what they should believe than about any other group of topics.”

“By nature, we evaluate nearly every situation according to its immediate impact on our desires, and we make our choices accordingly. Consequently, we often sacrifice that which would bring infinite eternal benefit in exchange for temporary gratification.”

“Jesus shows us that blaming others for our failures is not only offensive to God; it is detrimental to our relationships. While we all want healthier relationships, most of us have a hard time breaking free from our natural inclinations. The words of Christ… can bring about extraordinary change in every relationship in your life, for the rest of your life. … We can have better relationships with anyone who crosses our path, but it doesn’t happen naturally. Jesus provides both the revelation and the power that frees us from our human nature.”