Arsalan Abu on Clubhouse

Bio

The naturalistic model admits no directing intelligence. It’s only matter interacting by mechanistic pushes or pulls. But could any of these effects by themselves produce humans with all their varied talents, or even a single cell of such a creature? There would seem to be a fundamental disconnect between the soulless, unguided mechanisms available to Darwinian materialism and humans endowed with both soul and mind.

What if we consider the question from a theistic perspective? Having a mind to comprehend nuclei and neutron stars, and the ability to create works of artistic genius, may be a considerably less surprising outcome if humans are made by a being who is himself an artistic and mathematical genius.

When the Big Bang model of the origin of the universe was first proposed, some scientists sought to dismiss it. They did so not because the evidence for it was weak, but because the theory implied a beginning out of nothing, which disagreed with their presupposition of naturalism. If their dogmatic insistence had won over the community of cosmologists, progress toward the truth might have stalled.

Before 1929 it was considered conventional wisdom among many astronomers that the universe was infinitely old and never had a beginning. This viewpoint wasn’t based on scientific knowledge, but rather on philosophical preference. The motivations for such a preference were varied and, in some cases, complex. For some the preference was simple: if the universe never began, then one doesn’t have to explain a beginning, or consider the possibility of a Creator. But discoveries in the early twentieth century provided evidence that philosophical belief in an eternal universe was wrong.

The theory of general relativity clarifies that the galaxies we observe to be receding from us are not flying away through space, like shrapnel from a hand grenade. Instead, they are being carried away from us by ever-expanding space itself. The correct conception is to picture the galaxies as floating in space, but with the space between galaxies continuously expanding. This perfectly explains Hubble’s Law, which shows that the more space there is between galaxies, the faster they move apart.
Most of us are not used to the counter-intuitive idea that space can expand. We tend to think of space as a fixed emptiness between points. Within the framework of general relativity, however, space not only can expand, but it also can bend or warp, and even flow.