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Response to Mr. Kraus’ Opinion Piece in the Wall Street Journal on Christian Scientists (not the religion of Christian Science)
I read the June 26, 2009 opinion piece by Mr. Lawrence M. Kraus and found his rational atheism to contain irrationality and false views of Christian scientists (not the practitioners of the religion of Christian Science). First, the centerpiece of science is not atheism, in practice or theory. The fact that the world runs on principles that are repeating, predictable, and reliable enough for scientists to base trustworthy predictions and proof is evidence of the faithfulness of the Creator and his promises, not evidence that there is no Creator. Mr. Kraus appears to premise his understanding of Christian scientists as only believing in the miraculous and out-of-the-ordinary, like the virgin birth.
Second, Mr. Kraus avoids the Achilles Heel of atheistic science; it has not and cannot account for the existence of life, at its origin and as it is sustained. No matter how many times a scientist has flashed a charge of electricity into a broth of chemical soup, no life has ever been created. The best they’ve accomplished is a few rudimentary precursors to amino acid molecular components. Mr. Kraus and other atheist scientists thus live in their own imagined world of atheistic science, thinking that because God does not manifest himself to them in an odd or outstanding miracle, He must not exist.
Thus, Mr. Kraus is correct and incorrect. Correct that Christians believe in the miraculous, but all of life – every moment any creature draws a breath or a cell folds a protein or passes the correct proportion of chemicals through an ionized channel of charges in the cell – is a miracle. Every moment of existence establishes the Creator as the initiator and maintainer of our entire existence. It is the atheist who is most insistent upon miracles because he or she believes that God cannot be unless He presents Himself to them in an experiment that the scientist can repeat in a laboratory, as if God were his experimental rat. That view in itself contradicts the very definition of an all-powerful Creator. Therein is Mr. Kraus incorrect – he bases his view of science on a faulty premise and faulty logic.
The scientist who is a Christian can rely upon experimental evidence because there is a faithful Creator who established principles of existence, not because there is not a Creator, a patently absurd and unscientific delusion.