Arguing with atheists

My friend Fred described a weak atheist as a person who simply doesn't believe any sort of God exists, while a strong atheist wants to get in your face and tell you why you're stupid for believing in an invisible man in the sky, or some such nonsense. I liked those helpful definitions, and knowing the distinction. You might believe that, having written a book titled Counterargument for God, I relish every opportunity I get to argue with every atheist who I might happen to encounter. But you would be wrong. In fact, you couldn't be more wrong, and always remember that there are gradations of wrong. There's simply no reason to argue with a weak atheist. He or she isn't spoiling for a fight, and it would be rude to goad them into one by insulting them or calling them names. I have no interest in flaunting my faith, and it most certainly isn't my place to judge somebody else and tell them they're going to Hell for not believing exactly as I do. Isn't that fun to hear! For that reason among others, I'm still quite reluctant to invite strangers to church because I don't want weak atheists to feel like I'm trying to shove my God down their throat. In my opinion, it requires the mutual interest of two people to maintain a dialogue, and my interests are far from limited to theological discussions. Now, if someone is interested in polite conversation about what I personally believe and why I wrote the book, I'm more than capable and happy to accommodate, if returning three times to the same radio show to be interviewed by the same atheist friend serves as … [Read more...]

Counterargument for God: 2013 Readers’ Favorite finalist

Truly, my cup overflows. My book Counterargument for God has been named one of six finalists for in the 2013 Readers' Favorite International Awards contest in the Non Fiction category Religion/Philosophy. One very kind reviewer said: As I review this book, I find myself wanting to quote the author. His presentation is tactful, eloquent and stated in a logical manner. John Leonard has extensively researched the scientific arguments he discusses in this book...The author states his own personal beliefs in a non-threatening logical manner. I find this book well-written and documented. It is very easy to highly recommend this book. On a somewhat related note, Dr. Robert Rose will be interviewing me on Wednesday, July 10th. This will be my third visit to "Rewiring Your Brain." The first two interviews took place earlier this year, on April 5th and then again on April 17th where I offered my "positive" counterargument for God using the best scientific evidence the current experts in their respective fields have given us. I was very pleased when Dr. Rose invited me back for a third hour, this time to discuss how Christianity affected my life. Dr. Rose is one of the most interesting and open-minded atheists I've met on my faith journey. It should be a very interesting conversation. Best of all, I've doubled my odds of earning that trip to Miami! … [Read more...]

DNA, put in perspective when compared to LEGOs

Behold, a life-size replica of a Star Wars X-Wing fighter, made out of LEGOs. According to this article in New York magazine, the full scale model required 5,335,200 LEGOs and took 32 master builders working more than 17,000 hours to complete. The LEGO X-Wing has a wing span of 44 feet, weighing 44,000 pounds. Any parent whose kids enjoyed LEGOs has a memory of stepping barefoot on one of the ubiquitous plastic blocks. But don't worry about the LEGO X-Wing; it's all glued together as one piece. Now whether or not you are a fan of the toy building blocks, you'll  have to admit the LEGO X-Wing fighter is one impressive creation. Compared to the DNA molecule, however, the LEGO X-Wing is actually quite simple. Over five million building blocks were used? That's nothing compared to the six billion bits of information called nucleotides that comprise a DNA molecule, the "LEGO" of life. The complex instructions coded into DNA provide the blueprint for an organism that is produced through an ordered and specific process of development into a body plan. For abiogenesis to have occurred, either the enormously improbable event occurred in which DNA self-organized just in time for some fortuitous catalyst caused inanimate matter to come to life...or, some sort of help was somehow involved. In fact, two-time Nobel Prize-winning scientist Ilya Prigogine said, The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero. While I have tremendous respect for the … [Read more...]

A conversation about evolution with Dr. Benoit Leblanc

After I wrote an open letter to Dr. Jerry Coyne, Dr. Benoit Leblanc was kind enough to comment at length in response. He wrote, Dear Mr. Leonard, I hope you won’t take umbrage at my attempt to answer your questions, even though I am not in the same league as Dr. Coyne. I am however a biologist, and having taught for the past ten years the molecular mechanisms that make evolution possible, I may be able to shed some light on a few points. Let me start by saying that your curiosity does you credit, and even though I understand that you come at this with a creationist/IDer mindset, I laud you for at least askng questions. I also hope that I won’t come across as pedantic, but I must admit something: very often, people with limited training in biology will be puzzled by things that are so basic to those trained in the art that these may adopt a condescending tone when answering questions. I hope that won’t be the case here. There is an anecdote I’d like to tell: many years ago, my wife and I had dinner with our landlord, a kindly mathematician from Heidelberg university. Making conversation, I asked what he was working on I knew that it had to do with some kind of high-level arithmetics, but being a biologist and not a true math-head I was quite the novice in that field. He took a second to think about it, then smiled charitably and said, apologetically, almost, “… you would not understand”. Which, of course, was true. It’s not that, seeing me as untrained, he thought I was stupid or ignorant but knew that I lacked the information and the experience required to … [Read more...]

A brief glimpse of the Big Picture

Life cannot evolve until it exists. When I recently made that point during a series of questions I asked in another post, Dr. Benoit Leblanc responded by writing, Your fourth question is the least contentious one, because it deals with matters that lie outside of evolutionary biology. “Until life exists, how can it evolve?” The answer is, of course, “it can’t”. Evolutionary theory is not concerned with abiogenesis, although its principles do apply to the evolution of increasingly-efficient unliving replicators (such as self-replicating nucleic acids) that may, in time, acquire characteristics that we associate with living creatures. Such is the power of the natural selection concept: in a population of replicators that can accumulate mutations, the replicators that gain a replicative advantage will, by definition, replicate better. To his credit, Dr. Leblanc made the effort to respond, though he conceded my point while simultaneously suggesting he and his colleagues don't care that the spontaneous origin of life was a wildly improbable anomaly, at best With all due respect and while I’m sure Dr. Leblanc is considerably more knowledgeable about evolutionary biology than me, I cannot begin to fathom how he could possibly make the statement that evolution theorists could be completely unconcerned about the hypothesis called abiogenesis while simultaneously agreeing with Dr. Coyne's assertion that evolution theory is true, beyond any question or reproach. Quid est veritas? What is the purpose of studying science? Is it to cherry-pick from the evidence that … [Read more...]