The Case for a Creator

Lee Strobel

The context is a set of interviews with persons who can speak to the evidence for a Creator. Ch 1: White-Coated Scientists vs Black-Robed Preachers

p7 Starts with his retrospective of being a reporter and his trip to West Virginia were townsfold were revolting agains textbooks that taught evolution.

p11 a good dialog in defense of their objections to what the textbooks were teaching.

p12 Visit to a public rally. School boycott.

p16 Implications of Darwinism according to William Provine of Cornell.

p23 Gaylord Simpson "man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind."

p23 Nancy Pearcy "you can have God or natural selection, but not both... If we admit God into the process, Darwin argued, then God would ensure that only 'the right variations occurred .. and natural selection would be superfluous.'"

Phillip Johnson, Darwin on Trial "the whold point of Darwinism is to show that there is no need for a supernatural creator, because nature can do the creating by itself."

p23 Ernst Mayr "the real core of Darwinism" is natural selection, which "permits the explanation of adaption... by natural means, instead of by divine intervention."

Francisco Ayala .. Darwin's "greatest accomplishment" was to show that "living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process, natural selection, without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent."

p24 Provine, asked whether there is "an intellectually honest Christian evolutionist position ... or do we simply have to check our brains at the church house door?", responded "You indeed have to check your brains."

24 Edward O. Wilson "If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection ... genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species."

p24 Daniel Dennett Darwinism is a "universal acid" that "eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview."

p25 Bertrand Russell long quote of his position that the world is purposeless and devoid of meaning. "man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving ... only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."

Ch 2. The Images of Evolution

p19 Miller Urey experiment, Darwin's "Tree of Life",

p20 Haeckel's Embryos

p21 The Missing Link

p21 Christian de Duve "no sense in which atheism is enforced or established by science."

p21. Kenneth R. Miller evolution "is not anti-God".

p21 Michael Ruse "No sound argument has been mounted showing that Darwinism implies atheism."

p22Jean Pond a biologist , describes herself as "a scientist, an evolutionist, a great admirer of Charles Darwin, and a Christian."

Ch 3 Doubts About Darwinism

p31 Interview with Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution.

p94 "In three minutes, ninety-eight percent of all the matter there is or ever will be has been produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful too. And it was done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich." Bill Bryson in A Short History of Nearly Everything.

p95 Edward Milne in treatise on the mathematics of relativity "As to the first cause of the universe ... that is left for the reader to insert, but our picture is incomplete without Him."

p97 The Kalam cosmological argument for God. William Lane Craig. Kalam = speech or argument.

p98 Kalam "Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, t he universe has a cause."

p108 Robert Jastrow "the essential element in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis is the same; the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply, at a definite point in time, in a flash of light and energy."

Audio/Video Reference

R Nave