Introducing Gunter Bechly: his change to belief (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, September 16, 2022, 18:27 (589 days ago) @ dhw

He was a profound atheist who bumped into ID:

https://salvomag.com/article/salvo62/a-long-surrender

"I returned to Germany to study biology and paleontology at the universities of Hohenheim and Tübingen, where I graduated with the equivalent of a master’s degree in biology and a Ph.D., summa cum laude, in paleontology in 1999.

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"While I had started from a materialist, clockwork-universe perspective, I soon discovered certain implications of modern physics that did not fit well with such an obsolete, 19th-century worldview. I stumbled upon further problems, such as the questions of causality, the ontology of time and space, the status of mathematics, and the laws of nature. This brought me even deeper into metaphysics with issues like the problem of universals, the one and the many, the persistence of diachronic (personal) identity, free will, and the hard problem of consciousness.

"I soon realized that materialism is untenable, and I searched for a new worldview that could explain these problems and make sense of the world we experience.

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"I also studied “process thought”—the idea that reality consists of dynamic processes, rather than enduring entities. I became a genuine process philosophy nerd and even named a new fossil dragonfly species after process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in 2010.

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"I was still into process philosophy when I embraced intelligent design theory, so my support for ID had nothing to do with religion, but only with scientific arguments. I had come to see that Neo-Darwinism simply fails to explain the diversity and complexity of life and that these are better explained by an infusion of information from outside the system. The information does not have to come from a divine, miraculous intervention, but of course that would be compatible with such a view.

"As I further thought about process philosophy, I stumbled upon two fatal problems: (1) it does not allow for a real, enduring person as a free agent, because it views the individual mind as a kind of succession of occasions, like a string of pearls; and (2) it implies an infinite past, which is inconsistent with big bang cosmology as well as arguments against an infinite causal series.

***

"I definitely did not find what I had expected when I started looking into sophisticated apologetics. I read a lot and watched the debates of William Lane Craig and others. These introduced me to philosophical arguments for theism. What most impressed me were the argument from the fine-tuning of the universe, the argument from reason, the argument from contingency (to answer the question, “why is there anything rather than nothing?”), the argument from the uncanny effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences, and the argument for God as the very source of the laws of nature.

"I started with popular apologetics and then dove deep into the academic literature. I did not want to become a theist, but the overwhelming, cumulative power of the arguments, of which I have only mentioned a few, ultimately convinced me that theism must be true beyond reasonable doubt. There is a God!"

Comment: A profound atheist converted himself. I was a soft agnostic who followed Bechly's approach. Lots of reading. I'm now a firm theist. Any non-theist, to test his position, should do the same reading