From our perspective within the universe, time is linear. The past has already occurred, and the present is happening right now. As you read these words, the present is becoming the past. Once an egg has been broken, time cannot be reversed to a point where the egg is unbroken once again. The past is comprised of historic events; the present is comprised of current events. But what is the future? Is the future knowable? Can the future be predicted? In terms of statistical probability, the past is a historical event, and therefore has a probability of 100 percent. We may not be aware or we may have incorrect data regarding the events that took place on March 7, 1801, but we can be (reasonably) sure that March 7, 1801 occurred, and was preceded by March 6, 1801 and followed by March 8. Only if we allow for the possibility that far-fetched explanations are equally plausible (such as, the suggestion that we live in a simulation created yesterday and we've been programmed of false memories of every day before yesterday) can we even question the veracity of the prior claims about March 7, 1801. Twenty four hours later, the present had become March 8th and the past was now March 7th. On that day the future would be March 9th. Today all three of those dates are now in the past. But what if someone on March 7th predicted an event on March 8th or March 9th, and that prediction came true? The specificity of the claim would determine how credible we interpret the prediction to be, wouldn't it? For example, on March 7th, John Smith could predict that a bank would be … [Read more...]

Here's the truth, unvarnished -- nobody really knows much of anything with absolute certainty. We think we know, but we don't know. For example, without a DNA test, you don't know with absolute certainty that your parents really are your mother and father. There have been well-documented cases (albeit rare, but they do exist) of babies being accidentally switched at birth by the hospital. The odds are dramatically in favor of your mother and father being your real biological parents, but it isn't an absolute certainty until the DNA tests have been performed. I'm not saying DNA tests are absolutely necessary -- nine times out of ten the eyeball test is good enough, but on the other hand, looks can be deceiving. Many people believe they can make certain claims with absolute certainty: claims such as "God exists!" or "God does not exist!" or "climate change is real" or "evolution is a fact" or "the moon landing was faked" or "the Earth is flat" or "there are only two biological sexes", which are all knowledge claims that can never be proved beyond reasonable doubt to the complete and total satisfaction of another human being who arbitrarily disagrees with the original knowledge claim. None of them can be proved, meaning there are zero exceptions. In my book The God Conclusion I endeavor to make and reinforce this point, saying the probability that a supernatural God exists can be demonstrated to be extremely high using only logic and scientific evidence to argue my case, but I make it emphatically clear that the existence of God cannot be proved beyond all … [Read more...]

I'm going to be honest -- I've just about given up any hope of my book ever gaining any sort of traction in the marketplace of new ideas. I don't know if people even read books anymore, so I invested in creating an audiobook, but that isn't selling, either. Perhaps it's the subject matter. God is a complicated subject, and maybe people just don't have the time nor interest in pursuit of a difficult subject. I don't think anyone can accuse of me of giving up without a fight, but it does seem to be a losing battle, not just an uphill one. Seventeen thousand people follow my Facebook page, The God Conclusion, but only a small fraction of those people have bought my book, or read a free copy in exchange for an honest review. I have had difficulty even giving away free audiobooks, and apparently most of those who accepted them never bothered to listen to the book because they never wrote a review. Without honest feedback from readers, especially in this economy, people just aren't going to take a chance and spend the money to buy my book, so wasting more money on advertising seems futile. I got excited to see a new review had finally been published on Amazon, but then I saw the review was one-star, and the person who wrote the review obviously never read the book because he described it as "Typical YEC nonsense" and my book does NOT argue for Young Earth Creationism. In fact, it does the opposite, talking about the Big Bang and a universe that science tells us is billions of years old. I don't argue about the age of the Earth at all, and consider myself Earth-age … [Read more...]

Truth be told, I'd prefer to never have an argument. I would prefer a calm, polite discussion to an argument, every time. Nevertheless, when you get into a conversation with an atheist, unless it is my friend The Faithiest Atheist, the conversation will rather quickly become adversarial, and more akin to an argument than anything else. For example, on The God Conclusion podcast, I was describing to my atheist guest how I'd managed to create a binary alternative regarding the origin of the universe by saying the universe (and life) were either planned or unplanned. Planning requires a designer and the alternative requires order to come from chaos for no particular reason. My guest didn't like this argument and claimed that I'd committed a logical fallacy known as a false dichotomy by violating the law of the excluded middle, but my response was there is no excluded middle because the only alternative to an event being an accident is that the event was planned and thus happened on purpose. In other words, there are no planned accidents. That idea is an oxymoron. It wasn't in the podcast -- the exchange took place on The God Conclusion Facebook page, but I'm virtually certain this very same atheist and I were discussing evolution versus intelligent design and I was in the process of conceding that while macroevolution is a competitive theory, it is inferior to intelligent design when my adversary interrupted and claimed that evolution was the only alternative, and intelligent design was simply not available for serious consideration. I confess his grotesque … [Read more...]