A Letter to Unbelievers

How real scientific evidence converted me from agnosticism

Evolution, the big bang, the origin of life, nuclear physics, DNA, radiometric dating, genetics, and fossils

I don’t know how many years I have left, but surely not very many, having had 81 good years already. But I’ve been wishing I could speak to, or at the very least, write to, my ‘unbelieving’ friends and family before I die – to give them some reasons to consider changing their minds about whether God exists.

First, I’ll assume that no reasonable person would actually think that they could ever prove that God does not exist. So a self-described atheist is of course taking that position on faith; not on scientifically proven fact. Therefore, an atheist is hardly in a position to ridicule someone who has faith in a different viewpoint.

It’s easier to understand the position of an agnostic. I was an agnostic by the time I was 16, and I stopped going to church, upsetting my parents, who nevertheless knew better than to force me to go to church. An agnostic is simply saying that you can’t prove whether God exists or not. So why go to church, or synagogue, or whatever?

Why indeed? By senior year in high school and through college, I found this position very convenient, because I wanted to do a bunch of things I knew were forbidden to a serious Jew, Christian, or Muslim. (I’ll say something about other religions later.)

But now, having been thoroughly converted by the time I was 27, I see things very differently.

Since there’s no sense quoting bible verses to someone who doesn’t even believe God exists, speak nothing of whether the bible is inspired by God, I’ll try to keep this letter as a logical and philosophical approach sans bible verses. 

First, in order to be sure that God does not exist, you would have to know everything, because the one thing you don’t know might be God. Likewise, you’d have to be everywhere, because the one place you’re not might be where God is.

The big questions are, Where did we come from? How did we get here? What is the purpose of life?

I suspect all answers can be boiled down to two alternatives. Either we were created by an omnipotent God, which implies purpose, or we ‘evolved’ by some purposeless, chance process. The latter idea is not very uplifting, but we want the truth, wherever it leads.

Where I’m coming from

My education was not just math, physics, and chemistry. Hamilton College is a liberal arts college. English Lit and philosophy and history and language were required. I really like science and still try to keep up on it. Our lab training in physics and chemistry was very rigorous. If an experiment produced data that had deviations of more than 2%, we had to do the experiment over. We could not ‘fudge’ the numbers. A theory, to be worth anything, has to be testable, and the test results have to be repeatable. I will call that ‘operational science’.

I’m a logical thinker. Not too creative or intuitive I guess; just a plodding thinker. I like to see evidence and logic before I accept an idea as valid. As a skeptic, it took a lot to convince me that it’s more logical to believe God exists than to have faith that he doesn’t.

The theory of evolution

The theory of evolution doesn’t meet the criteria of being testable or repeatable. Said theory is about the past. Therefore the theory of evolution can no more be scientifically proven than the existence of God.

Science has a history of wrong ideas being stubbornly held onto by what I’ll call the “establishment” – whatever majority view that many careers and reputations are vested in. Mendel wasn’t appreciated until after he died. And Pasteur was ridiculed. And you know about Galileo.

The Big Bang?

It’s somewhat amazing how many folks (not honest scientists) think evolution is a “proven fact”. On the contrary, there are at least 14 different theories about the so-called “Big Bang”; none of which are provable.

How life began

Biologists and microbiologists have been trying for over a hundred years to explain how life began. They really don’t have a clue. The test tube experiments by Miller and Urey in the ‘50s have proven nothing.

They don’t tell you that the amino acids formed in the lab were few and momentary; the amino acids that can come together to form protein just as quickly come apart. They don’t tell you that the amino acids found in living organisms are all “left-handed” but the ones that come together randomly are just as apt to be “right-handed”.

J.Bergman, PhD, Aug.1 2004  Originally published in Journal of Creation 18, no 2 (August 2004): 28-36.

They don’t tell you that they used an oxygen-free ‘atmosphere’ in their experiments, so the chemical compounds formed in the experiments wouldn’t be destroyed by oxidation, even though there is plenty of evidence that earth’s early atmosphere had plenty of oxygen.  J.Bergman  see ref. above

The necessary molecular ingredients that are needed were conveniently supplied and controlled by the experimenters, even though it’s unlikely they would all be found available at the same time and place under natural conditions. The right amount of energy and favorable environment was supplied and controlled. It’s purely hypothetical to think that the same could happen in nature.

Watson and Crick

About the same time as the Miller-Urey experiments, James Watson and Francis discovered the double helix structure of DNA. This was an important discovery, but claims that this explained the origin of life are infinitely exaggerated. More about this below. Crick later tried to overcome the huge hurdles of evolution of life from non-living chemicals on earth, by writing in a book called “Life Itself”, that some form of primordial life was shipped to the earth billions of years ago in spaceships—by supposedly ‘more evolved’ (therefore advanced) alien beings.

That just begs the question – How did life form on whatever planet he has it supposedly coming from?

What holds the nucleus together?

As far as that goes, we don’t even really know what holds the nucleus in an atom together! In fact, that’s what got me thinking that maybe God does exist. My senior year in college, taking the equivalent of 5 years of physics and in the middle of a semester on nuclear physics, I realized there was a mystery. The nucleus of an atom has protons and neutrons. The protons have a positive electrical charge. The attraction between positive and negative charges is what holds the negatively charged electrons in a cloud-type orbit. But wait – unlike charges attract, and like charges repel. So why don’t the protons repel each other and fly apart? After sleeping on that riddle and poring over my nuclear physics textbook and not finding an answer, I finally went to the head of the physics department and asked him. “What holds the nucleus together?” He said “We call that the ‘strong’ force.” I said “What’s the ‘strong force’?” So help me, he said “That’s what holds the nucleus together.” In other words, it’s like gravity. We know it exists, but we don’t really have a clue as to what or how or why.

Genetics law: like begets like

To sum up so far, scientists don’t agree on how the universe began, or how life could have come from non-life, or what holds the atom together. In fact, we see that life begets life, and like begets like. That like begets like, that is, puppies come from dogs; not cats, etc, is considered a law; not a theory. It’s considered a law of genetics because it’s not only repeatable, there are no known exceptions, ever.

We don’t have any idea how life could come from non-life.

A study of genetics and biology not only confirms the obvious, that life begets life and like begets like, but it also is about how many elaborate mechanisms there are to keep life forms from changing, except within limits in response to changes in environment. A living cell is very busy, forming the exact type and quantity of proteins needed by the organism. A study of the workings of a living cell reveals amazing ways that the DNA forms proteins and corrects any mistakes during the process. In other words, cells are self-correcting in their protein and enzyme production and in their reproduction, insuring stasis – the exact opposite of the idea of evolving into something else.

There are hundreds of varieties of dogs, but within limits – ie, they’re still dogs; not cats. We never see one kind changing into another kind.

DNA

It’s not just a problem of biology and chemistry – there is the huge question of Where did the information come from? A single strand of DNA contains as much information as hundreds of volumes of books. How could it possibly have come together by random chance? The odds are infinitely against it.

Circular reasoning

The expression “survival of the fittest” explains nothing. It’s a tautology of circular reasoning. Of course the fittest survive – what would you expect?

Another classic case of circular reasoning is the way in which rocks and fossils are dated. They don’t come with a date stamped on them, like “50,000 B.C.” LOL. If you ask a fossils ‘expert’ how he knows how old the fossil is, he’ll generally say “By what geological rock layer it was found in.” But if you ask a geologist how he knows how old the layers are, he’ll usually say “By the fossils that were found in that layer.”

Radiometric dating methods

Remember, I was a physics major. I understand radiometric dating methods fairly well. The thing is, they are all based on assumptions that cannot be proven – like how much radioactive material was in the rock sample originally, vs how much is left now? But we simply don’t know how much there was in the beginning, when the rocks were formed. There are many other problems with radiometric dating, including a history of fudged data to make answers come out the way they’re wanted. One of the almost laughable problems is the fact that when the results disagree with some other method, like the afore-mentioned dating of rock layers or fossils, the results of the radiometric tests are conveniently discarded. It’s easy to discard the results, by simply figuring that one of the basic assumptions was invalid – like the sample was contaminated, or somehow the radioactive elements either leached out of the sample during ‘millions’ of years, or the opposite – that some radioactive material somehow leaked into the sample.

Media and establishment bias

There is actually much very credible evidence that life is not millions of years old, and that it did not evolve. The problem is that the evidence has been severely suppressed. There’s nothing new about the ‘cancel culture’. For many years, it’s been almost impossible for a scientist to get published in any ‘mainstream’ scientific journal if he or she disagrees with the establishment’s theory of evolution. It doesn’t matter how well qualified the non-evolutionary scientist is, or how carefully he has gathered his data – if he doesn’t toe the line, he won’t get published. The same thing is true for the more popular media – from TV programs to magazine and news articles.

Evidence

Actually, we all have the same evidence (except what has been suppressed); we just have different interpretations. For example, you can look at the Grand Canyon (I’ve hiked and backpacked down into it several times, and rafted the river) and you can say it was carved out by a little water over millions of years, based on today’s observable rate of erosion, or you can say that it was carved out by a whole lot of water, in a gigantic flood, in an extremely short time. I’ve observed firsthand plenty of evidence of the latter. For example, I saw a petrified tree trunk down near the bottom of the canyon that was nearly vertical. It was partially exposed from being embedded and then eroded in the rock layers. How could this be? The layers had to have been laid down quickly enough so that the tree was completely preserved. There’s no evidence that the tree had any time to rot or decay. It was just as well preserved at the top of the cliff as at the bottom.

Fossils

Contrary to what paleontologists say, the fossil record is actually a strong evidence against evolutionary change and for stasis. If Darwin was right, and if one kind of plant or animal evolved into another kind due to millions of little changes supposedly caused by ‘natural selection’, then we should expect to find it very difficult to identify or classify any fossil organism. Instead, we should expect to find millions of transitional, ‘in-between’ forms. But what we find is nothing but distinct forms, with no undisputed transitional forms! The exact opposite of what the theory predicts.

My favorite argument on this point is ‘living fossils’. I have a wonderful book titled “Living Fossils” by Dr. Carl Werner. Dr. Werner graduated summa cum laude from the U of Missouri with a degree in biology. He then received his doctoral degree in medicine at age 23. His book is chock full of hundreds of beautiful full page color plates that compare living organisms with their fossils side by side, and you can’t tell the difference in structure. His wife did the photography. She graduated with a Batchelor of Science degree from Excelsior College in Albany, N.Y.

This work is an amazing demonstration of ‘stasis’ – the tendency of life forms not to change.

Where is this going?

I could go on and on with both scientific and logical reasons refuting the theory of evolution. It’s incredible how many holes there are in the theory. And it’s infuriating to me that any so-called scientist would have the gall to say that evolution is a proven fact. I guess, like the deer hunter that sees horns where there aren’t any, they see what they want to see. Why? Why are so many so unwilling to look at the other side?

I think it’s a combination of things. If some prominent person has spent years publicly espousing an idea, like evolution, then it would be humiliating to publicly admit they were wrong all along. Pride gets in the way.

Then there’s financial pressure. The theory is so entrenched that you could lose your job for speaking against it. And forget about getting any funding or grants for research, either on the individual level or the university level.

Then there’s the horrible alternative. If evolution isn’t true, what’s the alternative? Horror of horrors – we must have been created by an omnipotent, omniscient Being. And if God created us, the implication is that we’d better find out what he expects of us - but that would mean reading the bible and we fear that would mean changing our whole lifestyle and worldview – and people don’t like change.

That leads to another question – is the bible truly God’s communication to us, as it claims? If we were created by God, it’s perfectly reasonable that he would want to communicate with us. After all, where did we get the desire to communicate, if not from him? Where did we get the idea of love and beauty and joy and laughter? Could it be that’s what it means to say we were made in his image?

A suggestion

If there is life after death, we’re talking about life’s most important question. If you think God doesn’t exist, and the bible isn’t true, what if you’re wrong? The bible says there is a heaven and a hell, and its description of hell is of a place you definitely don’t want to go to. What if the bible is true?

So you owe it to yourself to investigate this question for all you’re worth. Don’t just assume you’ve been right all your life. Just as it took a long time for me to come around to the thinking that God exists, it took a long time for me to accept that the bible is true. I could give you many, many evidences for that – but that’s another step. As I said, first you’ve got to decide if you believe in God. Although it is interesting that simply reading the bible will lead you to believe in God and Jesus, if you read it with an open mind as a sincere truth seeker.

Once I became convinced that the bible is true in all the ways it can be checked and tested (history, archaeology, and many other ways - Stay tuned for next week.) the next big question was “What about all the miracles”? – the biggest one being the resurrection of Christ.

Some great minds have tackled this question and decided that Jesus really did raise from the dead – men like C.S.Lewis (Mere Christianity), Josh McDowell (Evidence That Demands a Verdict), Lee Strobel (The Case for Christ), Frank Morrison (Who Moved the Stone?, and many others smarter than I am.

And if Christ did raise from the dead, as he said he would, and as the prophets predicted, then Christianity is unique among all the religions of the world. Confucious and Mohammed and all the others are still in their graves. But the tomb of Christ is empty. The apostle Paul writes that there were over 500 eye witnesses that saw Jesus after he rose from the grave.

Of course, if Jesus raised from the dead, then all the other miracles are not so hard to believe. Actually, it makes sense. If the universe and all life were created by God, then it seems pretty obvious that God can do anything. He’s not limited by the laws of physics, because he created the laws of physics (and he can hold the nucleus together!).

Read the bible. Check it out for yourself. Unlike most books, you can start in the latter part – take your pick of one of the gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John – four eye witness accounts of the story of Jesus and how he loves us so much he was willing to suffer and die in our place in order to make a way for us to be with him forever in heaven. All the apostles and many early Christians died for their faith in Jesus and his resurrection, and would not recant even when threatened with certain death in the coliseum. Do you really think every one of them would have died for a hoax or a lie or a fake story?

Next week: Why I’m convinced the bible is true from cover to cover - it took a lot of evidence