Book the evidence of god pdf free download

Slowly, methodically, scientists supplied answers to mysteries insufficiently explained by theologians. Reason pushed faith off into the shadows of mythology and superstition, while atheism became a badge of wisdom. Our culture, freed from moral obligation, explored the frontiers of secularism.

God was dead. Greeley But now, in the twilight of the twentieth century, a startling transformation is taking place in Western scientific and intellectual thought. At its heart is the dawning realization that the universe, far from being a sea of chaos, appears instead to be an intricately tuned mechanism whose every molecule, whose every physical law, seems to have been design from the very first nanosecond of the big bang toward a single end—the creation of life.

This intellectually and spiritually riveting book asks a provocative question: Is science, the long-time nemesis of the Deity, uncovering the face of God? Patrick Glynn lays out the astonishing new evidence that caused him to turn away from the atheism he acquired as a student at Harvard and Cambridge. The facts are fascinating: Physicists are discovering an unexplainable order to the cosmos; medical researchers are reporting the extraordinary healing powers of prayer and are documenting credible accounts of near-death experiences; psychologists, who once considered belief in God to be a sign of neurosis, are finding instead that religious faith is a powerful elixir for mental health; and sociologists are now acknowledging the destructive consequences of a value-free society.

God: The Evidence argues that faith today is not grounded in ignorance. It is where reason has been leading us all along. Proof of God is the unlikely story of how this serious scientist and this broken writer, in a series of conversations stretching over several months, come to understand that the universe—from the smallest sub-atomic particles that make up everything in existence to the farthest reaches of the universe—bears evidence of a creator.

In short, God not only exists, but science gives us tools to know this. Proof of God shows how science and religion both point to the same stunning and world-changing truth: God is real.

Responding to contemporary popular atheism, Robert J. Spitzer's New Proofs for the Existence of God examines the considerable evidence for God and creation that has come to light from physics and philosophy during the last forty years.

An expert in diverse areas, including theology, physics, metaphysics, and ethics, Spitzer offers in this text the most contemporary, complete, and integrated approach to rational theism currently available. In this splendid new book Father Robert Spitzer explores the implications of the latest discoveries in big bang cosmology, string theory, quantum physics, and the ontology of time to craft a series of convincing philosophical arguments. Koterski, S.

Spitzer's new proofs pose a serious and compelling challenge to the unconscious hegemony of naturalism in the worlds of both philosophy and the sciences. Beckwith, Baylor University "Rare is the theologian who keeps abreast of the latest developments in fundamental physics, and even rarer the one who can discuss them with the theological and philosophical sophistication that Fr. Spitzer displays in this book. A challenging and original work. The renowned science writer, mathematician, and bestselling author of Fermat's Last Theorem masterfully refutes the overreaching claims the "New Atheists," providing millions of educated believers with a clear, engaging explanation of what science really says, how there's still much space for the Divine in the universe, and why faith in both God and empirical science are not mutually exclusive.

A highly publicized coterie of scientists and thinkers, including Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, and Lawrence Krauss, have vehemently contended that breakthroughs in modern science have disproven the existence of God, asserting that we must accept that the creation of the universe came out of nothing, that religion is evil, that evolution fully explains the dazzling complexity of life, and more.

In this much-needed book, science journalist Amir Aczel profoundly disagrees and conclusively demonstrates that science has not, as yet, provided any definitive proof refuting the existence of God. Why Science Does Not Disprove God is his brilliant and incisive analyses of the theories and findings of such titans as Albert Einstein, Roger Penrose, Alan Guth, and Charles Darwin, all of whose major breakthroughs leave open the possibility— and even the strong likelihood—of a Creator.

Bolstering his argument, Aczel lucidly discourses on arcane aspects of physics to reveal how quantum theory, the anthropic principle, the fine-tuned dance of protons and quarks, the existence of anti-matter and the theory of parallel universes, also fail to disprove God.

From the principle that the loved ones of God always meet with success to the moral awareness of human beings to the fine-tuning of the universe, Hazrat Mirza Bashir-ud-Din Mahmud Ahmad ra , the second successor of the Promised Messiah as , sets forth ten Quranic arguments to show with compelling force that the existence of God can be established with full certainty and in a manner which is beyond refute.

Does God exist? Which is true? Evolution, creation Are we no more than meaningless collisions of molecules? Or do we owe our existence to a Creator, who has willed us and everything else into being, and who has a plan and purpose for our lives? In simple, accessible language, and well-supported by scientific experts, author Steven Hemler guides the reader through the most compelling evidence for the existence of God.

Hemler shows how natural sciences such as biology, chemistry and physics far from disproving religious belief suggest and reveal the existence of a Creator at every turn. Those seeking sound reasons and credible science supporting belief in God will cherish this easy-to-read book. Richard Swinburne presents a substantially rewritten and updated edition of his most celebrated book.

No other work has made a more powerful case for the probability of the existence of God. Swinburne gives a rigorous and penetrating analysis of the most important arguments for theism: the cosmological argument; arguments from the existence of laws of nature and the 'fine-tuning' of the universe; from the occurrence of consciousness and moral awareness; and from miracles and religious experience.

He claims that while none of these arguments are deductively valid, they do give inductive support to theism and that, even when the argument from evil is weighed against them, taken together they offer good grounds to support the probability that there is a God. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs.

Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Topics islamic , books Collection opensource Language English. At the same time, now only twenty-two but married with a bright and inquisitive daughter, I was becoming more social. I had often preferred to be alone when I was younger.

Putting all of these sud- den revelations together, I questioned everything about my pre- vious choices, including whether I was really cut out to do science or carry out independent research. I was just about to complete my Ph. With a carefully practiced speech, I attempted to convince admissions committees that this turn of events was actually a natural pathway for the training of one of our nation's future doctors. Inside I was not so sure. After all, wasn't I the guy who had hated biology because you had to memorize things?

Could any field of study require more memo- rization than medicine? But something was different now: this was about humanity, not crayfish; there were principles under- lying the details; and this could ultimately make a difference in the lives of real people. I was accepted at the University of North Carolina. Within a few weeks I knew medical school was the right place for me. I loved the intellectual stimulation, the ethical challenges, the human element, and the amazing complexity of the human body.

In December of that first year I found out how to combine this new love of medicine with my old love of mathematics.

An austere and somewhat unapproachable pediatrician, who taught a grand total of six hours of lectures on medical genetics to the first-year medical student class, showed me my future.

He brought patients to class with sickle cell anemia, galac- tosemia an often-fatal inability to tolerate milk products , and Down syndrome, all caused by glitches in the genome, some as subtle as a single letter gone awry.

Though the potential to actually do anything to help very many of those afflicted by such genetic diseases seemed far away, I was immediately drawn to this dis- cipline. While at that point no shadow of possibility of anything as grand and consequential as the Human Genome Project had entered a single human mind, the path I started on in December of turned out fortuitously to lead directly into participation in one of the most historic undertakings of humankind.

This path also led me by the third year of medical school into intense experiences involving the care of patients. As physicians in training, medical students are thrust into some of the most intimate relationships imaginable with individuals who had been complete strangers until their experience of ill- ness. Cultural taboos that normally prevent the exchange of in- tensely private information come tumbling down along with the sensitive physical contact of a doctor and his patients.

It is all part of the long-standing and venerated contract between the ill person and the healer. I found the relationships that developed with sick and dying patients almost overwhelming, and I strug- gled to maintain the professional distance and lack of emo- tional involvement that many of my teachers advocated.

What struck me profoundly about my bedside conversa- tions with these good North Carolina people was the spiritual aspect of what many of them were going through.

If faith was a psychologi- cal crutch, I concluded, it must be a very powerful one. If it was nothing more than a veneer of cultural tradition, why were these people not shaking their fists at God and demanding that their friends and family stop all this talk about a loving and benevolent supernatural power? My most awkward moment came when an older woman, suffering daily from severe untreatable angina, asked me what I believed.

It was a fair question; we had discussed many other important issues of life and death, and she had shared her own strong Christian beliefs with me.

I felt my face flush as I stam- mered out the words "I'm not really sure. That moment haunted me for several days. Did I not consider myself a scientist? Does a scientist draw conclusions without considering the data? Could there be a more important question in all of human existence than "Is there a God? Suddenly all my arguments seemed very thin, and I had the sensation that the ice under my feet was cracking. This realization was a thoroughly terrifying experience.

After all, if I could no longer rely on the robustness of my atheistic po- sition, would I have to take responsibility for actions that I would prefer to keep unscrutinized? Was I answerable to someone other than myself? The question was now too pressing to avoid. But I determined to have a look at the facts, no matter what the outcome. Thus began a quick and confusing survey through the major religions of the world.

Much of what I found in the CliffsNotes versions of different religions I found reading the actual sacred texts much too difficult left me thor- oughly mystified, and I found little reason to be drawn to one or the other of the many possibilities.

I doubted that there was any rational basis for spiritual belief undergirding any of these faiths. However, that soon changed. I went to visit a Methodist minister who lived down the street to ask him whether faith made any logical sense. He listened patiently to my confused and probably blasphemous ramblings, and then took a small book off his shelf and suggested I read it.

The book was Mere Christianity by C. In the next few days, as I turned its pages, struggling to absorb the breadth and depth of the intellectual arguments laid down by this leg- endary Oxford scholar, I realized that all of my own constructs against the plausibility of faith were those of a schoolboy.

Clearly I would need to start with a clean slate to consider this most important of all human questions. Lewis seemed to know all of my objections, sometimes even before I had quite formu- lated them. He invariably addressed them within a page or two. When I learned subsequently that Lewis had himself been an atheist, who had set out to disprove faith on the basis of logical argument, I recognized how he could be so insightful about my path.

It had been his path as well. To understand the Moral Law, it is useful to consider, as Lewis did, how it is invoked in hundreds of ways each day with- out the invoker stopping to point out the foundation of his argu- ment. Disagreements are part of daily life. Some are mundane, as the wife criticizing her husband for not speaking more kindly to a friend, or a child complaining, "It's not fair," when different amounts of ice cream are doled out at a birthday party.

Other arguments take on larger significance. In international affairs, for instance, some argue that the United States has a moral ob- ligation to spread democracy throughout the world, even if it requires military force, whereas others say that the aggressive, unilateral use of military and economic force threatens to squander moral authority. In the area of medicine, furious debates currently surround the question of whether or not it is acceptable to carry out re- search on human embryonic stem cells.

Some argue that such research violates the sanctity of human life; others posit that the potential to alleviate human suffering constitutes an ethical mandate to proceed. This topic and several other dilemmas in bioethics are considered in the Appendix to this book. Notice that in all these examples, each party attempts to appeal to an unstated higher standard. This standard is the Moral Law. What is being debated is whether one action or another is a closer approximation to the demands of that law.

Those ac- cused of having fallen short, such as the husband who is insuf- ficiently cordial to his wife's friend, usually respond with a variety of excuses why they should be let off the hook. Virtually never does the respondent say, "To hell with your concept of right behavior. It thus seems to be a phenomenon approach- ing that of a law, like the law of gravitation or of special relativity.

Yet in this instance, it is a law that, if we are honest with ourselves, is broken with astounding regularity. As best as I can tell, this law appears to apply peculiarly to human beings. Though other animals may at times appear to show glimmerings of a moral sense, they are certainly not widespread, and in many instances other species' behavior seems to be in dramatic contrast to any sense of universal tightness. It is the awareness of right and wrong, along with the development of language, awareness of self, and the ability to imagine the future, to which scientists generally refer when try- ing to enumerate the special qualities of Homo sapiens.

But is this sense of right and wrong an intrinsic quality of being human, or just a consequence of cultural traditions? Some have argued that cultures have such widely differing norms for behavior that any conclusion about a shared Moral Law is unfounded. If a man will go into a library and spend a few days with the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, he will soon discover the massive unanimity of the practical reason in man.

From the Babylonian Hymn to Samos, from the laws of Manu, the Book of the Dead, the Analects, the Stoics, the Platonists, from Australian aborigines and Redskins, he will collect the same triumphantly monotonous denunciations of oppression, murder, treachery and falsehood; the same injunc- tions of kindness to the aged, the young, and the weak, of almsgiving and impartiality and honesty.

Yet when surveyed closely, these apparent aberrations can be seen to arise from strongly held but misguided conclusions about who or what is good or evil. If you firmly believed that a witch is the personifi- cation of evil on earth, an apostle of the devil himself, would it not then seem justified to take such drastic action?

Let me stop here to point out that the conclusion that the Moral Law exists is in serious conflict with the current post- modernist philosophy, which argues that there are no absolute rights or wrongs, and all ethical decisions are relative. This view, which seems widespread among modern philosophers but which mystifies most members of the general public, faces a series of logical Catchs. If there is no absolute truth, can postmodernism itself be true? Indeed, if there is no right or wrong, then there is no reason to argue for the discipline of ethics in the first place.

Others will object that the Moral Law is simply a conse- quence of evolutionary pressures. If this argument could be shown to hold up, the interpretation of many of the requirements of the Moral Law as a signpost to God would potentially be in trouble—so it is worth examining this point of view in more detail.

Consider a major example of the force we feel from the Moral Law—the altruistic impulse, the voice of conscience call- ing us to help others even if nothing is received in return. Not all of the requirements of the Moral Law reduce to altruism, of course; for instance, the pang of conscience one feels after a minor distortion of the facts on a tax return can hardly be as- cribed to a sense of having damaged another identifiable human being.

First, let's be clear what we're talking about. By altruism I do not mean the "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" kind of behavior that practices benevolence to others in direct ex- pectation of reciprocal benefits. Altruism is more interesting: the truly selfless giving of oneself to others with absolutely no secondary motives.

When we see that kind of love and generos- ity, we are overcome with awe and reverence. Oskar Schindler placed his life in great danger by sheltering more than a thou- sand Jews from Nazi extermination during World War II, and ul- timately died penniless—and we feel a great rush of admiration for his actions. Mother Teresa has consistently ranked as one of the most admired individuals of the current age, though her self-imposed poverty and selfless giving to the sick and dying of Calcutta is in drastic contrast to the materialistic lifestyle that dominates our current culture.

Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun, tells the fol- lowing Sufi story. One morning, finishing her meditation, she saw a scor- pion floating helplessly in the strong current. As the scorpion was pulled closer, it got caught in roots that branched out far into the river. The scorpion struggled frantically to free itself but got more and more entangled.

She immediately reached out to the drowning scorpion, which, as soon as she touched it, stung her. The old woman withdrew her hand but, having regained her balance, once again tried to save the creature. Every time she tried, however, the scorpion's tail stung her so badly that her hands became bloody and her face distorted with pain. A passerby who saw the old woman struggling with the scorpion shouted, "What's wrong with you, fool! Do you want to kill yourself to save that ugly thing?

And if we have actually acted on that impulse, the con- sequence was often a warm sense of "having done the right thing. Lewis, in his remarkable book The Four Loves, further explores the nature of this kind of selfless love, which he calls "agape" pronounced ah-GAH-pay , from the Greek. He points out that this kind of love can be distinguished from the three other forms affection, friendship, and romantic love , which can be more easily understood in terms of reciprocal benefit, and which we can see modeled in other animals besides our- selves.

Agape, or selfless altruism, presents a major challenge for the evolutionist. It is quite frankly a scandal to reductionist rea- soning. It cannot be accounted for by the drive of individual selfish genes to perpetuate themselves. Quite the contrary: it may lead humans to make sacrifices that lead to great personal suffering, injury, or death, without any evidence of benefit. And yet, if we carefully examine that inner voice we sometimes call conscience, the motivation to practice this kind of love exists within all of us, despite our frequent efforts to ignore it.

Sociobiologists such as E. Wilson have attempted to ex- plain this behavior in terms of some indirect reproductive bene- fits to the practitioner of altruism, but the arguments quickly run into trouble. One proposal is that repeated altruistic behav- ior of the individual is recognized as a positive attribute in mate selection.

Another argument is that there are indirect reciprocal benefits from altruism that have provided advantages to the practitioner over evolutionary time; but this explanation cannot account for human motivation to practice small acts of con- science that no one else knows about. A third argument is that altruistic behavior by members of a group provides benefits to the whole group. Examples are offered of ant colonies, where sterile workers toil incessantly to create an environment where their mothers can have more children.

But this kind of "ant al- truism" is readily explained in evolutionary terms by the fact that the genes motivating the sterile worker ants are exactlythe same ones that will be passed on by their mother to the siblings they are helping to create.

That unusually direct DNA connec- tion does not apply to more complex populations, where evolu- tionists now agree almost universally that selection operates on the individual, not on the population. The hardwired behavior of the worker ant is thus fundamentally different from the inner voice that causes me to feel compelled to jump into the river to try to save a drowning stranger, even if I'm not a good swim- mer and may myself die in the effort.

Furthermore, for the evo- lutionary argument about group benefits of altruism to hold, it would seem to require an opposite response, namely, hostility to individuals outside the group. Oskar Schindler's and Mother Teresa's agape belies this kind of thinking.

Shockingly, the Moral Law will ask me to save the drowning man even if he is an enemy. There is truly something unusual going on here. To quote Lewis, "If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe—no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house.

The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves.

Surely this ought to arouse our suspi- cions? Here, hiding in my own heart as familiar as anything in daily experience, but now emerging for the first time as a clarifying principle, this Moral Law shone its bright white light into the recesses of my childish atheism, and de- manded a serious consideration of its origin. Was this God looking back at me?

And if that were so, what kind of God would this be? Would this be a deist God, who invented physics and mathematics and started the universe in motion about 14 billion years ago, then wandered off to deal with other, more important matters, as Einstein thought?

No, this God, if I was perceiving Him at all, must be a theist God, who desires some kind of relationship with those special creatures called human beings, and has therefore instilled this special glimpse of Himself into each one of us.

This might be the God of Abraham, but it was certainly not the God of Einstein. Judging by the incredibly high standards of the Moral Law, one that I had to admit I was in the practice of regularly violating, this was a God who was holy and righteous. He would have to be the embodiment of goodness. He would have to hate evil. And there was no reason to suspect that this God would be kindly or indulgent. The grad- ual dawning of my realization of God's plausible existence brought conflicted feelings: comfort at the breadth and depth of the existence of such a Mind, and yet profound dismay at the realization of my own imperfections when viewed in His light.

I had started this journey of intellectual exploration to con- firm my atheism. That now lay in ruins as the argument from the Moral Law and many other issues forced me to admit the plausibility of the God hypothesis.

Agnosticism, which had seemed like a safe second-place haven, now loomed like the great cop-out it often is. Faith in God now seemed more ra- tional than disbelief. It also became clear to me that science, despite its unques- tioned powers in unraveling the mysteries of the natural world, would get me no further in resolving the question of God. If God exists, then He must be outside the natural world, and therefore the tools of science are not the right ones to learn about Him.

Instead, as I was beginning to understand from looking into my own heart, the evidence of God's existence would have to come from other directions, and the ultimate decision would be based on faith, not proof. Still beset by roiling uncertainties of what path I had started down, I had to admit that I had reached the threshold of accepting the possibility of a spiritual worldview, including the existence of God.

Years later, I encountered a sonnet by Sheldon Vanauken that precisely described my dilemma. Its concluding lines: Between the probable and proved there yawns A gap. Afraid to jump, we stand absurd, Then see behindws sink the ground and, worse, Our very standpoint crumbling. Desperate dawns Our only hope: to leap into the Word That opens up the shuttered universe. Finally, seeing no escape, I leapt. How can such beliefs be possible for a scientist?

Aren't many claims of religion incompatible with the "Show me the data" attitude of someone devoted to the study of chemistry, physics, biology, and medicine? By opening the door of my mind to its spiritual possibilities, had I started a war of world- views that would consume me, ultimately facing a take-no- prisoners victory of one or the other? I certainly have had my own: Isn't God just a case of wishful thinking?

Hasn't a great deal of harm been done in the name of religion? How could a loving God permit suffering? How can a serious scientist accept the possibility of miracles? If you are a believer, perhaps the narrative in the first chap- ter offered some reassurance, but almost certainly you, too, have areas where your faith conflicts with other challenges you face from yourself or those around you. Doubt is an unavoidable part of belief.

In the words of Paul Tillich, "Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. But imagine such a world, where the opportunity to make a free choice about belief was taken away by the cer- tainty of the evidence. How interesting would that be? For the skeptic and the believer alike, doubts come from many sources. One category involves perceived conflicts of the claims of religious belief with scientific observations.

Those concerns, particularly prominent now in the field of biology and genetics, are dealt with in subsequent chapters. Other concerns reside more within the philosophical realm of human experi- ence, and those are the subject of this chapter. If you are not someone who is troubled by these, then feel free to turn to Chapter 3.

In addressing these philosophical issues, I speak mainly as a layman. Yet I am one who has shared these struggles. Espe- cially in the first year after I came to accept the existence of a God who cared about human beings, I was besieged by doubts from many directions. While these questions all seemed very fresh and unanswerable upon their first arrival, I was comforted to learn that there were no objections on my list that had not been raised even more forcefully and articulately by others down through the centuries.

Of greatest comfort, many won- derful sources existed that provided compelling answers to these dilemmas. I will draw upon some of these authors in this chapter, supplemented by my own thoughts and experiences.

Many of the most accessible analyses came from the writings of my now familiar Oxford adviser, C. Is God really there?

Or does the search for the existence of a su- pernatural being, so pervasive in all cultures ever studied, rep- resent a universal but groundless human longing for something outside ourselves to give meaning to a meaningless life and to take away the sting of death?

While the search for the divine has been somewhat crowded out in modern times by our busy and overstimulated lives, it is still one of the most universal of human strivings. Lewis describes this phenomenon in his own life in his wonder- ful book Surprised by Joy, and it is this sense of intense longing, triggered in his life by something as simple as a few lines of po- etry, that he identifies as "joy. As a boy often, I recall being transported by the experience of looking through a telescope that an amateur astronomer had placed on a high field at our farm, when I sensed the vastness of the universe and saw the craters on the moon and the magi- cal diaphanous light of the Pleiades.

Much later, as an atheist graduate student, I surprised myself by experiencing this same sense of awe and longing, this time mixed with a particularly deep sense of grief, at the playing of the second movement of Beethoven's Third Symphony the Eroicd. As the world grieved the death of Israeli athletes killed by terrorists at the Olympics in , the Berlin Philharmonic played the powerful strains of this C-minor lament in the Olympic Stadium, mixing together nobility and tragedy, life and death.

For a few moments I was lifted out of my materialist worldview into an indescribable spiritual dimen- sion, an experience I found quite astonishing. More recently, for a scientist who occasionally is given the remarkable privilege of discovering something not previously known by man, there is a special kind of joy associated with such flashes of insight.

Having perceived a glimmer of scientific truth, I find at once both a sense of satisfaction and a longing to understand some even greater Truth. In such a moment, sci- ence becomes more than a process of discovery. It transports the scientist into an experience that defies a completely natu- ralistic explanation. So what are we to make of these experiences? And what is this sensation of longing for something greater than ourselves? Is this only, and no more than, some combination of neuro- transmitters landing on precisely the right receptors, setting off an electrical discharge deep in some part of the brain?

The atheist view is that such longings are not to be trusted as indications of the supernatural, and that our translation of those sensations of awe into a belief in God represent nothing more than wishful thinking, inventing an answer because we want it to be true.

This particular view reached its widest audi- ence in the writings of Sigmund Freud, who argued that wishes for God stemmed from early childhood experiences. Writing in Totem and Taboo, Freud said, "Psychoanalysis of individual human beings teaches us with quite special insistence that the God of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relationship to God depends on the relation to his father in the flesh, and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an ex- alted father.

In his elegant recent book, The Question of God, Armand Nicholi, a psychoanalytically trained Harvard pro- fessor, compares Freud's view with that of C. If we are looking for benevolent coddling and indulgence, that's not what we find there. Instead, as we begin to come to grips with the existence of the Moral Law, and our obvious inability to live up to it, we realize that we are in deep trouble, and are poten- tially eternally separated from the Author of that Law.

So why should wish fulfillment lead to a desire for God, as op- posed to a desire for there to be no God? Finally, in simple logical terms, if one allows the possibility that God is something humans might wish for, does that rule out the possibility that God is real?

Absolutely not. The fact that I have wished for a loving wife does not now make her imagi- nary. The fact that the farmer wished for rain does not make him question the reality of the subsequent downpour.

In fact, one can turn this wishful-thinking argument on its head. Why would such a universal and uniquely human hunger exist, if it were not connected to some opportunity for fulfill- ment?

Again, Lewis says it well: "Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a de- sire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

Why do we have a "God-shaped vacuum" in our hearts and minds unless it is meant to be filled? In our modern materialistic world, it is easy to lose sight of that sense of longing. Now the whole world seems not holy. We as a people have moved from pantheism to pan-atheism. It is dif- ficult to undo our own damage and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.

It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it. We are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. Did the wind used to cry and the hills shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of the earth, and living things say very little to very few. And yet it could be that wherever there is motion there is noise, as when a whale breaches and smacks the water, and wher- ever there is stillness there is the small, still voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song and dance, the show we drove from town..

What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are they not both saying: Hello? A major stumbling block for many earnest seekers is the com- pelling evidence throughout history that terrible things have been done in the name of religion.

Given such ex- amples of raw abusive power, violence, and hypocrisy, how can anyone subscribe to the tenets of the faith promoted by such perpetrators of evil?

There are two answers to this dilemma. First of all, keep in mind that many wonderful things have also been done in the name of religion. The church and here I use the term geneti- cally, to refer to the organized institutions that promote a par- ticular faith, without regard to which faith is being described has many times played a critical role in supporting justice and benevolence.

As just one example, consider how religious lead- ers have worked to relieve people from oppression, from Moses' leading the Israelites out of bondage to William Wilber- force's ultimate victory in convincing the English Parliament to oppose the practice of slavery to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

But the second answer brings us back to the Moral Law, and to the fact that all of us as human beings have fallen short of it. The church is made up of fallen people. The pure, clean water of spiritual truth is placed in rusty containers, and the subsequent failings of the church down through the centuries should not be projected onto the faith itself, as if the water had been the problem.

It is no wonder that those who assess the truth and appeal of spiritual faith by the behavior of any partic- ular church often find it impossible to imagine themselves join- ing up. The Beatitudes spoken by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount were ignored as the Christian church car- ried out violent Crusades in the Middle Ages and pursued a se- ries of inquisitions afterward. While the prophet Muhammad never himself used violence in responding to persecutors, Is- lamic jihads, dating to the earliest of his followers and including present-day violent attacks such as that of September 11, , have created the false impression that the Islamic faith is intrin- sically violent.

Even followers of supposedly nonviolent faiths such as Hinduism and Buddhism occasionally engage in violent confrontation, as is currently occurring in Sri Lanka. And it is not only violence that sullies the truth of religious faith. Frequent examples of gross hypocrisy among religious leaders, made evermore visible by the power of the media, cause many skeptics to conclude that there is no objective truth or goodness to be found in religion. Is it any wonder, then, that some commentators point to re- ligion as a negative force in society, or in the words of Karl Marx, "the opiate of the masses"?

But let's be careful here. In fact, by denying the exis- tence of any higher authority, atheism has the now-realized po- tential to free humans completely from any responsibility not to oppress one another. So, while the long history of religious oppression and hypocrisy is profoundly sobering, the earnest seeker must look beyond the behavior of flawed humans in order to find the truth.

Would you condemn an oak tree because its timbers had been used to build battering rams? Would you blame the air for allowing lies to be transmitted through it? Would you judge Mozart's The Magic Flute on the basis of a poorly rehearsed per- formance by fifth-graders? If you had never seen a real sunset over the Pacific, would you allow a tourist brochure as a substi- tute?

Would you evaluate the power of romantic love solely in the light of an abusive marriage next door? A real evaluation of the truth of faith depends upon looking at the clean, pure water, not at the rusty containers. There may be those somewhere in the world who have never experienced suffering.

I don't know any such people, and I sus- pect no reader of this book would claim to be in that category. This universal human experience has caused many to question the existence of a loving God. As phrased by C. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore, God lacks either goodness or power or both. Some are easier to accept than others. In the first place, let us recognize that a large fraction of our suffering and that of our fellow human be- ings is brought about by what we do to one another.

It is hu- mankind, not God, that has invented knives, arrows, guns, bombs, and all manner of other instruments of torture used through the ages. The tragedy of the young child killed by a drunk driver, of the innocent man dying on the battlefield, or of the young girl cut down by a stray bullet in a crime-ridden sec- tion of a modern city can hardly be blamed on God. After all, we have somehow been given free will, the ability to do as we please.

We use this ability frequently to disobey the Moral Law.