Addressing Secularism: When the Props of Chance Fail.
In Part One, I established that truth is knowable and that reason, when diligently applied, leads us to the reality of a transcendent God. Yet, the current of Western culture flows strongly in the opposite direction, dominated by the philosophy of naturalism—the assertion that nature is all that exists, that there is no supernatural reality, and that every phenomenon, from the formation of galaxies to the creation of a thought, must be explained by purely physical, non-directed causes.
Naturalism is the great intellectual and cultural challenger to faith. If it is true, then the questions of origin, meaning, and morality are definitively settled: they are merely accidents of chemistry, evolved for temporary utility. Therefore, to continue our journey to certainty, we must turn a critical, unblinking eye toward the primary claims of naturalism, particularly its proposed explanations for ultimate origins.
Naturalism makes a grand claim—that it can explain everything. But upon close, rational inspection, the philosophical props it relies on prove to be surprisingly flimsy. I will demonstrate how secular origin theories, even when framed by prominent scientists, often contradict reason, scientific evidence, and observable reality. I am not here to dismiss science, but to critique the philosophical assertion that tries to claim science as its exclusive territory.
The Problem of Ultimate Cosmic Origin: The Fine-Tuning Paradox.
The most fundamental question is the origin of the cosmos itself. Secular accounts, often rooted in the Big Bang model, describe the universe expanding from an initial singularity. While the physics and mathematics of the expansion are robust, the naturalistic assertion that this event occurred by pure, undirected chance runs headlong into the Fine-Tuning Paradox.
Simply put, the universe appears to be mathematically, almost impossibly, tailored for life. The laws of physics are governed by fundamental constants—values like the strength of gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the ratio of the electron mass to the proton mass. These constants are not derived from known laws; they are simply the given conditions of our universe.
The paradox lies here: if these values were altered by even the smallest fraction—in some cases, one part in a billion billion—the universe would be sterile. A slightly weaker gravitational force, and matter would never clump into stars and planets. A slightly stronger force, and the universe would have immediately collapsed. The precise density fluctuations in the early universe, the exact amount of dark energy, and the required initial low-entropy state all scream of an arrangement.
As the renowned British Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, noted when discussing the precise values of six key cosmological numbers: “The basic recipe involves these six numbers… if any one of them were to be [changed] by more than a few per cent, there would be no stars, no carbon, and no life.”
The naturalistic explanation for this incredible precision is often dismissed as pure luck, or by resorting to speculative, untestable theories like the multiverse—an infinite collection of universes that ensures, by sheer probability, that one of them had to hit the cosmic jackpot. But postulating an unobservable infinity of universes to explain one highly ordered universe is a philosophical leap, not a scientific conclusion, and certainly fails the test of observable reality.
The Problem of Life’s Origin: The Information Gap.
If the universe’s origin is problematic for naturalism, the origin of life on Earth—abiogenesis—presents an even more formidable obstacle. How did non-living chemicals assemble themselves into the first self-replicating, metabolizing cell?
Naturalism requires that, given enough time and energy, random chemical reactions somehow crossed the vast chasm separating inert molecules from living matter. Yet, the immense complexity of even the simplest cell fundamentally challenges this assertion. The cell is not merely a bag of chemicals; it is an irreducibly complex factory, requiring dozens of different molecular machines (proteins) that are simultaneously necessary for replication and energy production.
The greatest hurdle is information. The function of a cell is dictated by the precise sequence of chemical “letters” in its DNA and RNA—a sophisticated, digital-like code. This code is not merely ordered (like a repeating crystal structure); it is specified (like the text of a novel). Information theory consistently shows that specified complexity, whether in a computer program or a DNA molecule, is the product of intelligence, not random physical forces.
Dr. James Tour, a world-leading synthetic organic chemist, has repeatedly demonstrated that scientists cannot even rationally propose a method for synthesizing the necessary precursor molecules, let alone assembling them into a self-replicating system. He writes that scientists “have no idea how life arose,” and that the naturalistic explanations offered often rely on cartoon models rather than actual chemistry.
For naturalism to be true, the universe must have created its own operating system and coded its own software entirely by chance. This defies logic, the principles of information science, and the observable laws of chemistry.
The Problem of the Conscious Mind.
Finally, naturalism struggles profoundly to account for the unique phenomenon of the conscious mind—subjective experience, self-awareness, reason, and objective moral intuition.
If the mind is only the brain—a purely physical, chemical reaction, as naturalism asserts—then our thoughts, feelings, and even our most brilliant scientific insights are merely the predictable movements of atoms, nothing more than the fizzing of soda or the falling of a domino.
The devastating self-contradiction here is clear: If our thoughts are just the product of unguided chemical reactions designed solely for evolutionary advantage, why should we ever trust them to arrive at the objective truth? Why trust the very reason naturalists use to argue their case?
When the philosophical props for secularism fail to account for observable reality—the fine-tuning of the cosmos, the specified complexity of life, and the immaterial reality of the mind—the door opens wide for a logical, non-naturalistic explanation: the transcendent God we introduced in Part One.
