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The Debate Over God

article by Scott Ashley

In this issue we give you a look at some of the evidence for the existence of God.

Never have we seen atheists so aggressively promoting their cause. In the city where I live, an atheist group is paying to put up billboards that read: "God is an imaginary friend. Choose reality, it will be better for all of us." Several years ago it paid for other billboards that said: "Don't believe in God? You are not alone."

In London, a campaign several years ago plastered 800 of the city's famous red double-decker buses with signs stating: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

And of course, we've seen a recent spate of books by atheist authors bearing such titles as The God Delusion, The End of Faith and God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. 

We find ourselves standing at an odd crossroads in human history. Never have we seen atheists so aggressive in pushing their anti-God agenda while scientific discoveries are demonstrating again and again the existence of a divine Creator!

The number of revelations from many scientific fields is steadily growing as researchers peer more deeply into the mysteries of things as tiny as the cell and as large as our planet and the universe. Everywhere they look they see handiwork that can only be explained by miraculous power and divine intelligence-things that could never be the result of random chance as argued by evolutionists.

Several years ago atheists were embarrassed when one of the world's preeminent atheists, Oxford University professor Antony Flew, announced that his commitment to follow the scientific evidence wherever it led had compelled him to renounce his atheism and conclude that, as his 2008 book title stated, There Is a God.

What caused him to change his mind? In short, an objective look at the accumulating evidence from recent scientific discoveries. Regarding discoveries from microbiology, he wrote, "What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together" (p. 75, emphasis added throughout).

Looking on a much larger scale, that of the cosmos, Flew concluded: "The laws of nature ... 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. Such a discovery of the divine does not come through experiments and equations" (p. 155).

It wasn't just a matter of the obvious design he witnessed in these creations, but also the precise fine-tuning of the laws that governed them. "We still have to come to terms with the origin of the laws of nature," he wrote. "And the only viable explanation here is the divine Mind" (p. 121). 

In this issue we give you a look at some of the evidence for the existence of God that changed the mind of Antony Flew. When you've seen it, we hope you'll agree with the words of Psalm 111: "Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them. Full of splendor and majesty is his work ... The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding" (verses 2-3,10, English Standard Version).

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