‘Science has disproved Christianity’

‘science & faith cannot be

reconciled’

Peter AtkinsProfessor of Chemistry

Oxford University

Peter HiggsNobel Prize for Physics 2013

Professor William D. PhillipsNobel Prize for Physics 1997

Professor Sir John HoughtonIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Francis CollinsHead of Human Genome Project

“Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully

compatible with conventional religious beliefs—and equally compatible with atheism”

Stephen Jay Gould

“I simply do not believe that Gould could possibly have meant much of what he wrote in

Rocks of Ages.”Richard Dawkins

The God Delusion

‘Scientific belief is based on publicly checkable evidence, religious faith not only lacks

evidence, its independence from evidence is its joy, shouted from the rooftops.’

…these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of

God, and that by believing in him you will have life by the power of his name.

John 20: 31

Francis Collins

‘certainly does not describe the faith of most serious believers in history, nor most of those in my personal acquaintance’

Alastair McGrath

“Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attainable by scientific methods, and what

science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.”

Bertrand Russell

Chapter 3:‘Why there

almost certainly is no God’

‘Who made God?’

Alvin Plantinga

‘You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class.’

“Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attainable by scientific methods, and what

science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.”

Bertrand Russell

For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly

perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are

without excuse.

Romans 1: 20

Thomas Aquinas

• Things that begin to exist have causes

• The universe had a beginning

• God exists

The idea of a beginning is ‘thoroughly

unacceptable’, because it implies an ‘ultimate

origin of our world and gives creationists ample

justification’.

Sir John Maddox

“Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of

divine intervention”.

Stephen Hawking

“we know that there has to have been a very close balance

between the competing effect of explosive expansion and

gravitational contraction which, at the very earliest epoch about which we can even pretend to

speak (called the Planck time, 10-43 sec. after the big bang), would

have corresponded to the incredible degree of accuracy

represented by a deviation in their ratio from unity by only one part

in 10 to the sixtieth.

Stephen Hawking

“next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: 'What kind of

evidence is there for that?' And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.”

Richard Dawkins