The late Frank Pastore narrated a Prager U video, named Does God Exist. It was posted 3/30/2015. I took notes on the excellent video and will comment on its content.
Pastore (P after this): “For 27 years I was an atheist. I thought that anyone who believed in God was stupid, naïve, uneducated, gullible. Or into the gig for money, sex, or power. Religion is just a psychological crutch for intellectual weaklings.”
My response: Many atheists assume that it is weak and wimpy to depend on God to face the world, but God exists, and the good deities are energy fields of spiritual goodness that radiates out to our souls if we invite such wholesome incoming input. I would argue that life is suffering and hard enough, so some spiritual energy entering one’s soul gives one something to be cheered over, and that is not stupid or wimpy, but exciting and inspirational.
P: “Why I changed my mind. My Christian teammates on the Cincinnati Reds challenged me. I read some religious books, critiqued them,
and shared them with the guys. Atheism was the only answer for anyone not deceived by fantasy, fiction, and mythology. Atheism is for someone who wants to base their beliefs and values upon evidence and argument, not emotion and tradition.”
My response: Millions of people have had the religious craving for meaning and purpose for tens of thousands of years. I doubt that the hunger for spiritual fulfillment is just a psychological crutch: it must be an actual craving to fill a metaphysical inner void, a spiritual seeking after deities out there beckoning to seekers. Can such a persistence, ancient, primordial, near universal human drive just be a need for a secular, cultural narrative?
Still, arguments for theism or atheism, or evidence in support of either view are welcome and worth attending to, but I would be remiss if I did not alert the reader to that fact that, while I believe deeply, I know that we are so small and so parochial on this little planet, that our sweeping remarks for or against the existence of God seem premature and half-baked. I am not a religious skeptic, or even agnostic, but I invite people to be cautious concerning religious generalizations for evidence or arguments supporting God’s existence are still provisional.
P: “Simply put, I set out to disprove theism which I thought would not take very long. I ran into some difficulties along the way. Things like Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. What I became aware of was Four Big Bang Theories to be accounted for, not just one.
The First Big Bang theory is well known: why something rather than nothing—Pop and then there was something. Matter and space come into existence in a cosmological flash about 16 billion years ago. No gradual development, no transition of forms. Just a binary flip of the switch—now you don’t see it, and now you do metaphysically. Fine, I want to follow the evidence wherever it leads to the truth.
First, however, astrophysicists say the first Big Bang gave us only a handful of fundamental elements. It would take billions of years for the nuclear furnaces of trillions of stars to yield 118 elements on the periodic table.
The First Big Bang only yields matter and energy but does not address the origin of life. How do you get life from non-life? Abiogenesis: we life or something from nothing. How does that work? Where is the evidence? You are going to need another something from nothing leap of faith.”
My response: Pastore is clearly stating that the First Big Bang and what he labels the Second Big Bang, or momentous, unexplained, sudden change, to get something from nothing, first matter and energy, and second, life from inorganic matter and energy. He refers to these as leaps of faith lacking evidence. I am no scientist, but his criticism here seems plausible. First, was the cosmological Big Bang, and then we need something like a biological Second Big Bang to get life from non-life. It seems to me like a scientific and metaphysical dead lock, displeasing to both the materialists and materialists, neither side being able to provide evidence or argumentation decisive enough to explain doubtlessly how life came from non-life, and this ambiguity rather than knowing one way or another seems to be the human condition.
P: “Life from Non-Life, the biological, Second Big Bang: for all the mind-blowing advances we have made in physics, biology, and chemistry in the past 100 years, we have no clue how to explain life. The closer we look, the wider the chasm.
At this point we still only have physics, chemistry and basic biology, matter, energy, and simple life forms. We have no way to account for the great diversity of life forms from plants, animals, and simple bacteria. Nor can we account for the differences between animals and man.
We do not have an anthropology at this point, so we are going to need a Third anthropological Big Bang. This was what Darwin was after In His Descent of Man thesis. Now listen, Darwin answered a lot of questions, but he could never answer the core questions: how evolution began? Darwin answered that he had no idea.”
My response: It seems as if Pastore is suggesting that the Creator, the Great Uncaused Cause, breathed life into lifeless matter, so then evolution took off from that point of divine intervention in the natural world. Pastore does not explicitly say this, but I think he thought this way, that God as the source of life in the universe provides that Third anthropological Big Bang. This is the leap of faith that we theists make.
P: “But hey, we’re still not 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. Animals don’t appreciate beauty.
But the problem is more basic than that. How do you account for free will and introspection, let alone man’s pressing existential drive to ask ‘why?’”
My response: Pastore is not speaking of Big Bangs literally, but these are tropes for sudden, momentous, magnificent, transformational, evolutionary transitions that lead first to the rise of life and then intelligent life whose biological, mechanistic body is ruled by its personal ghost in the machine. This immaterial consciousness will direct its body and biological brain to act in alignment with its freely willed choices, to react to its introspections, and to ask questions about everything imaginable.
P: “Well, we are going to need some kind of psychological, Fourth Big Bang to account for man’s moral and esthetic sense of why—his search for meaning, significance and purpose. And of course, his appreciation for the true, the good and the beautiful.
And you must remember these problems require bang’s sudden, binary pops into existence since there is no evidence for gradual developments in any of these . So, I would like you to have a choice. It’s either faith in these four big bangs of ‘somethings’ to account for something around us, or faith in a Creator God behind it. The next time someone asks you about the Big Bang answer which one: the cosmological, biological, anthropological, or psychological.”
My response: My leap of faith if to side with Pastore.
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