I’m having some difficulty keeping up with all the replies, because life. I will try and catch up, though. But here is a comment I came across recently, which speaks of amateurs and experts.
“It is always hard to make a rule about the claim of the amateur to contradict the expert. One test, which would by itself cart away a great deal of lumber, is the rule that none is a specialist outside his own specialty. In magazines and such modern arenas this truism is often oddly disregarded. … But there is yet another line along which the conclusions of the expert may lawfully be tested by the amateur. And these are the cases in which the expert actually asserts what the amateur is able from his own knowledge to deny. We are not bound to believe the Astronomer Royal when he disproves the sun in heaven; and though I may respect my doctor when he tells me I am dying, I shall differ from him if he tells me I am dead.” (Chesterton, New Witness, March 2, 1916)
Examples that come to mind are intelligent design, “According to Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and an atheist, ‘By elementary school age, children start to invoke an ultimate God-like designer to explain the complexity of the world around them, even children brought up by atheists.’ Atheists, of course, find this problematic, so Gopnik has sought to reach children before they develop such thinking and indoctrinate them into evolution with her picture book, See Jane Evolve.” (Douglas Axe, here).
Or “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.” (Francis Crick)
Douglas Axe, in his book “Undeniable”, goes into why our intuition is actually valid, and ordinary people can really perceive this.
Another example is “The universe came from nothing”: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” (Stephen Hawking) But John Lennox points out why this is nonsensical, laws don’t create anything, they describe things. And all the laws of arithmetic can’t put money in my bank account. Then “X can create Y” makes sense, “X can create X” does not. For one, if you already have X, there is no need for it to be created! And so on.
Then if a scientist tells me my thoughts are solely the product of the motions of atoms in my head, and that they could compute what I would do next if only they had enough information, then I shall deny this. As the courts deny this, and say I am a real agent, and therefore I am responsible. And so do psychiatrists, they try and help people when they see that their thoughts are being caused by unreasoning sources such as mental illness. But the materialists tell us that that is actually what we are, the product of the motion of our atoms, of unreasoning sources, especially of our thoughts.
“DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.” (Richard Dawkins)
Well, try that in front of the judge, Dr. Dawkins!
And more Chesterton would seem pertinent:
“Take first the more obvious case of materialism. As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman’s argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, as, for instance, Mr. McCabe, and you will have exactly this unique sensation. He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea. The earth is so very large, and the cosmos is so very small.” (Orthodoxy)
