Reddit mentions of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

If by 'lacking' you mean 'nonexistent', then yes.

I went to public school but with heavy influence from my folks and church, all of whom seem to be involved in some sort of Fundamentalism competition. I learned exactly as much as I had to in order to pass the test, but I was always convinced it was a lie because scientists are all "out to get" Christianity.

I'm still wrapping my head around just how unhealthy this worldview can be.

I'll echo /u/Cognizant_Psyche - kudos on taking that first step and deciding to get smart on this topic.

I talked to my church pastor, who passed me off to his wife (who has apologetics degrees out the ass). She recommended The Language of God, a tactic which soundly backfired on her. That book was fantastic. It explains evolution from a DNA perspective but then tries to tell me I can still believe in God if I want to. For me, from such a fundamentalist, literalist background, the bible had to be true word-for-word, yet this book flew in the face of the entire Genesis account of creation. If that wasn't real, how could I trust any of the rest?

Once I was 'cleared' to learn about Evolution, I grabbed Dawkins' The God Delusion. I watched the Ham-Nye debate. I grabbed Who Wrote The New Testament, and Misquoting Jesus. That pretty much did it for me.

Hey OP, I'm going to respond to your last question first because I was an Atheist who converted. One thing off the bat is that cultivating faith is exactly that, cultivation. You cannot water a seed one night and the next morning ask why the plant isn't there. My faith took a long time to develop into something substantial. I did a lot of reading.


I'd really recommend The Language of God by Francis Collins to start. Collins helped the human genome project and is a Christian, he lays out a lot of the basic arguments for God's existence in this book. He's no dummy and I found it to be a great read.


Once you accept that there is most likely a God, the question becomes what God? As luck would have it, the Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship the same God as revealed to Abraham. Historically it is a fact a man known as Jesus lived and taught. You could say that he was a mad men, but people followed him. If Jesus did resurrect then Christianity itself would have died. You could make the argument that many people simply lied about him being resurrected but you would have to wonder why they would do so when they had nothing to gain but persecution. This religion grew and 2000 years later is still strong. That's impressive.


The old testament laws were part of the old law for Jews which Jesus replaced with a new law meant for all peoples.

Just want to start off of with saying that I am currently a christian sort of non-denomoninal I guess but I might think about that in more detail in the future. But I understand that you could be confused about the different accounts in the bible from the biblical writers. However humans tend to have somewhat different accounts of the same historical events which can be due to a few reasons, one is that they somehow interpreted the event somewhat differently, another possible reason could be due to the fact that the biblical writers got there at different times or may not have been paying attention the whole entire time thorefore it would not be shocking if they did indeed have somewhat different accounts. But my beliefs are that Jesus was who he said was which is the son of God and that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead. However I do think that is indeed some truth in the majority of the widely followed religions, since if we observe them more closely we can see that they have similar fundamental themes from different cultures who for the most part did not interact that much globably with other cultures since the world was much less connected back in that era. But I say though that you might be interested in philosopical theism here is an wikipedia article on it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_theism , and this wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnism , and this wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_theology also possibly look at some books at christian metaphysics, and look at scholastic philosophy here is an wikipedia article on it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism, read some of works by thomoas aqunias he was known as one of the greatest Christian Theologian/Philosophers who ever lived. I would also recommend the book the Experience of God by David Bently Hart, and the Atheist Delusion by David Bently Hart I have not read these books though yet but I have listening to some videos of him speaking on youtube and his ideas make a lot of sense and are very profound. I do plan on reading this books tho.

​

I would also recommend mere christianity by C.S. Lewis who was an atheist himself before he converted to christianity. And also some books by edward feser who was himself an atheist for a period of time after he lost his christian faith but then returned back to his faith. I would also recommend this book by Francis Collins who is an well-respected scientist in his field has a PhD in Physical Chemsitry from Yale University and also earned an MD degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is director of the NIH since 2009, and he has founded the biologos organization which has a goal of making the christian faith compatible with science in which is always has been until we got into a postmodern state of science vs fundamentalism religion which of course is certainly not the case and this us vs them is of course a false dichotomy science and religon are perfectly compatible insofar that they are not extreamly dogmatic with everything in the bible being the literally true word of God without there being any metaphores or similar literary devices. But anyway I should at least also mention that Francis Collins was an atheist during his time completing his higher eduction and ended up converting to the christian religion. Anyways here is the book he has written https://www.amazon.com/Language-God-Scientist-Presents-Evidence-ebook/dp/B000NY12E6

>I'm open to both the idea that god exists and that the bible is true. I am open to it.
But there is not sufficient evidence, and so I do not believe either of those two things.

I understand this completely, trust me. I was raised in a secular household and was an atheist most of my life (most of my comments on reddit are discussing religion so I feel like I mention this in every comment, haha).

I think the biggest thing for me is defining sufficient evidence. It's not a question that lends itself to unquestionable, empirical evidence. On top of that, some answers to the question require not just acknowledging the answer but living it (religious piety and devotion). It's not an easy problem to solve (if it can be solved at all).


 

>I've done just that, and now I am an atheist.

One thing I've realized about atheism is that it's pretty easy to align with, since it doesn't make any bold claims. I'm not saying belief systems need to make bold claims to be valid - that would be ridiculous. I'm saying atheism basically says "We know how works, and we don't know how works, so we'll keep trying to figure it out and see where it goes." There's nothing wrong with that (and in no way should we ever discourage research and the pursuit of knowledge, regardless of religious affiliation).

But, at the same time, I think that when atheists are looking at the questions that religion tries to answer, the evidence used isn't right for the problem. Knowing how the universe works doesn't contrast or disprove a designer of the universe, or a metaphysical realm. The fact that the universe exists means that a metaphysical realm is very likely - it just might be "empty" nothingness. An atheist looks at scientific discoveries as a replacement for god(s), but a religious person looks at these discoveries as an explanation of how god(s) did it. My point is that the truth that is resonating for atheists (or at least most of it) also resonates for religious folks, including Christians. We just have our own spiritual, metaphysical aspect in the picture as well.


 

>Who says I need to get far? Who says I haven't? And what do you mean by getting far?

When I say "getting far" I just mean exploring religion beyond lightly reading the texts while constantly fighting rolling your eyes. I meant actually giving them a chance, even if you end up deciding they're all nonsense. With a question like this, "getting far" is extremely subjective and all I can do is give you my own take on it.


 

>Let's say we didn't know what 2+2 evaluated to. If one religion gave the answer 72, another 42, another 620, is that in any way valid? No, just because we might not have a naturalistic answer to some questions doesn't mean that religion is valid.

I think understand what you're saying, but math isn't necessarily good example. Math is a constructed language to describe its real physical counterparts. We defined what "2" is and have thus defined what "4" is, in the sense that it is "2 + 2" or "1 + 1 + 1 + 1." The system very accurately describes the mathematical components of the universe, but the actual language of math is arbitrary. It is metaphysical in a sense, but it is mapped to a physical reality.

In the case of religion, the physical mapping is literally the universe. At least, it is in a way (and it depends on which religion you're talking about). Religion doesn't try to provide a language to discuss an existing system inside of the universe, it tries to explain the universe itself and the context of humanity and life within it. On the other hand, in a similar way to math - it explains self-aware humans as having souls and our gifts that put us above other animals as gifts from God. We are self-aware with intelligence and morality either way, regardless of whether or not you view them as God-given or as a result of pure natural evolution. In the case of religion, though, these aren't necessarily just arbitrary man-made ideas to explain physical realities. There is a potential that they are the system. Does that make sense? This particular answer was a little stream-of-consciousness-esque.


 

> Could you provide a demonstration? I do not believe this to be the case.

This is an answer that has been written as books for a reason - it's long. I have a blog and am planning on writing a page on this eventually, but in the meantime I don't want to look like I'm dodging your question. So here's something I wrote in another comment:

>Here are some of the examples of questions that, when I approached them with an open mind to the possibility (however small it was to me at the time) of a supernatural or external being, they made sense in that context.

>* Why are we so far above animals in terms of intelligence and self-awareness?

• Why did life appear in the first place? The amount of chance chemical combinations required for an amino acid alone is pretty impressive. I understand given an arbitrarily long amount of time it's possible. It just doesn't give a stronger (or weaker) answer than religion, to me. I'm not denying evolution, I'm just skeptical about it happening on its own from the point of no life to life.
  
• Why do we have altruistic tendencies and a moral system? We know what we should do even if nobody is actually doing that. This awareness is another thing that separates us from other animals.
  
• How is the universe such a fine-tuned system containing (IMO) irreducible complexity? The fact that there are observable and repeatable laws that govern the universe is pretty impressive. That it would happen by chance seems implausible to me.
  If there is a Creator, what kind of Creator would that be based on observing the universe that it created? This question is more for addressing current world religions or attempting to connect (or recognize the inability to connect) to a Creator. I think the universe has elements that point to design, and I think the Creator would need to be a personal God based on how human beings (and other social animals to an extent) interact and function psychologically.
  
  If you're interested in how I came to faith through reasoning it out, I highly suggest [The Reason for God](https://www.amazon.com/Reason-God-Belief-Age-Skepticism/dp/1594483493?ie=UTF8&Version=1&entries*=0) by Timothy Keller. Another great book that helped me and that also discusses the perception of science and faith being at war is The Language of God* by Francis Collins. He's the leader of the Human Genome Project and has some good input for questions like Christianity and evolution.
  
  
   
  
  One final thing I feel the need to say is that you're not going to wake up one morning and be 100% sure of God's existence, or any god's existence. It's called a "walk of faith" for a reason, and it's a complex answer to a very complex question. But just because it's not "easy" to believe doesn't mean it directly contradicts scientific evidence or all forms of logic, it's just that once you honestly don't believe in the supernatural it's hard to wrap your head around it. But that particular aspect doesn't reflect the validity of the supernatural answers, it's a result of our limited perception confined to the physical universe.
  
  Regardless of what you land on or if you even take any of this to heart, I wish you the best of luck with this journey (or, if you don't budge, I wish you luck with your life as it already is). :) If you want to talk to me more about it, you're welcome to do it via commenting or personal message if you'd prefer.
  

I'm a Christian that believes evolution.

If you love science I'd recommend these:

http://www.amazon.com/Language-God-Scientist-Presents-Evidence-ebook/dp/B000NY12E6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1397140633&sr=8-1&keywords=francis+Collins

http://www.amazon.ca/Why-Universe-Is-Way-It/dp/0801071968