The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [163]
CHAPTER FOUR: WHERE SCIENCE MEETS FAITH
1. Re-read the quotations that begin this chapter. They represent radically different viewpoints. Which position more accurately reflects your current position? What influences or factors prompted you to arrive at this perspective?
2. What was your first reaction to Stephen Jay Gould’s so-called NOMA principle, which says science and faith occupy distinct realms that shouldn’t overlap? Was your opinion buttressed or changed by Stephen Meyer’s analysis?
3. Meyer lists six ways in which modern science supports belief in God. Which one of these areas is most intriguing to you? Which, if any, engendered the most skepticism? If Meyer is correct concerning these six categories of evidence, how strong is the case for a Creator? How well do you believe Meyer responded to the objections to intelligent design theory? Which of his answers were the most convincing and why?
4. Every scientist has a motive, Meyer said, “but motives are irrelevant to assessing the validity of scientific theories.” Why do you agree or disagree with him?
5. Meyer said that he once resonated with Nietzsche’s question: Why should God rule and I serve? “Why should a condition of my happiness be submission to the will of God?” Meyer asked. “I sensed I couldn’t be happy without him; I knew my bad lifestyle only brought misery. So I ended up literally shaking my fist at God in a wheat field in Washington State.” Have you ever figuratively shaken your fist at God? What circumstances prompted that reaction? What has happened since then to resolved this issue? How might your current view of God—positive or negative—affect the way you assess the scientific evidence for his existence?
CHAPTER FIVE: THE EVIDENCE OF COSMOLOGY
1. How convincing is the first premise of the kalam cosmological argument—that whatever begins to exist has a cause? Can you think of any exceptions to that rule? How well do you believe William Lane Craig responded to the possibility that the universe might have emerged, uncaused, from a sea of quantum energy?
2. The second premise of the kalam argument says that the universe began to exist. Do you think the evidence from mathematics and cosmology sufficiently supports the claim that the universe had a beginning at some point in the past? Why or why not? How do you assess the strength of the arguments that seek to avoid the beginning of the universe?
3. The kalam argument says that if its two premises are true, then it’s logical to conclude that the universe has a cause. Can you think of any alternate theory that would support another conclusion?
4. Craig explains several characteristics of the cause of the universe that can be deduced from the evidence: “A cause of space and time must be an uncaused, beginningless, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, personal being endowed with freedom of will and enormous power.” How well do you believe Craig has argued for this list of qualities?
CHAPTER SIX: THE EVIDENCE OF PHYSICS
1. Robin Collins said the evidence for the fine-tuning of the universe is widely regarded as “by far the most persuasive current argument for the existence of God.” How do you personally assess the evidence? What facts were the most important in reaching your conclusion?
2. Do you think that the finely balanced parameters of physics could be the result of random happenstance? Why or why not?
3. Do you believe that ours is the only universe in existence, or that other universes also exist? What specific evidence prompts your belief? How do you assess Collins’s position that even if multiple universes exist, there must be an intelligently designed mechanism for creating them?
4. According to an article in the New York Times, some physicists “feel it is their mission to find a mathematical explanation of nature that leaves nothing to chance or the whim of the Creator.” Collins disagreed, saying, “We shouldn’t shrink back from the God hypothesis if that’s what