Founders saw existence of God as one of the ‘self-evident’ truths

Michael Newdow speaks to the media in this 2004 photo taken in Sacramento, Calif. / AP / Rich Pedroncelli

 

By Hal McKenzie   March 31, 2004 

The Supreme Court last week took up the question of whether the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance are unconstitutional. The suit was brought by atheist Michael Newdow, who argues that the words must be deleted because they are offensive to atheists.  “It’s indoctrinating children,” he said. “The government is supposed to stay out of religion.”   

This is a case where semantics instead of facts dominate the argument. The fact of the matter is that the issue it is not about religion, but about truth. If there is no God, then atheism must be true and Newdow should prevail. On the other hand, if God really does exist, then Newdow is a crackpot trying to impose his baseless belief on the rest of society.   

The founding fathers did not see the existence of God as a belief, but as a truth. They said in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights …” They added that the purpose of government is to protect those rights to which “nature’s God” entitles us. For Newdow’s case to have any validity, he must prove that some new evidence has emerged in the last two centuries that proves the existence of God is no longer evident.   

Obviously the progress of science in the last half-century has bypassed Newdow and his fellow atheists. The more scientists delve into the facts of nature, the more they come to the conclusion that there must be an intelligent designer at work in nature. In other words, the truth of God’s existence is more evident today than when our nation was founded!   

Darwin’s theory is a century-old idea that was part of the so-called “Enlightenment” that began a century before. It may have been more accurately called the “Enstupidment,” because it led to some of the most pernicious fallacies in human history.   

Darwin, along with Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx and other materialistic thinkers, inspired the militant atheism of communism. The Russian revolution tried to establish a nation under atheism, but it failed spectacularly, along with its spin-offs of which North Korea is the most heinous surviving example, destroying the lives of millions and embroiling the world in warfare, dictatorship and violence.   

Science has moved light years beyond the primitive mechanistic science of the 18th and 19th centuries, which hardly scratched the surface of the real world. Quantum theory, as it delved into the tiniest particles of matter, found that matter itself vanishes into waves and vibrations of energy. This has led to new theories about the reality of God, for example Lee Bauman’s God at the Speed of Light: The Melding of Science and Spirituality based on evidence from experiments in quantum physics and quotes from some of the great scientific minds of our time.   

The late astronomer Fred Hoyle, who coined the phrase “big bang,” wrote that it is as likely that life began from random mutations as it is that a tornado blowing through a junkyard could assemble a 747 jumbo jet. Einstein himself doubted that life could have come about by chance.   

True, the intelligent design movement is attacked by hard-core Darwinists who sometimes display religious fervor akin to the Spanish Inquisition. At the very least, however, the non-existence of God is very much in doubt since scientists of similar credentials dispute it. Wouldn’t it violate the legal principle of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” therefore, to grant legal sanction to the establishment of atheism?   

Today most people accept the truth that the earth is round, although only a few centuries ago the issue was hotly debated and most people believed the earth was flat. Believe it or not, however, despite the space program and photos of the Earth from apace, a small group of diehards still insist that the earth is flat – the Flat Earth Society. They are entitled to their beliefs, but that does not mean the rest of us have to acquiesce to them.   

Imagine that a Flat Earther sued to ban all astronomy teaching in school and abolish NASA on the grounds that they offend his belief in a flat earth. Of course, he would be laughed out of town. Newdow’s suit is similarly ludicrous in the assertion that “under God” should be removed from the Pledge of Allegiance when there is so much credible evidence that God is real.   

Since, according to Dembski and many other scientists as well as most Americans, there really is a supreme intelligence behind the universe, then America would be foolish in the extreme not to acknowledge that intelligence and seek to tap into it, especially in an enterprise as complex as building a nation. It would be like trying to mount a space program while believing that the earth is flat! That is why the communist experiment in atheism was such a dismal failure and why Americans should roundly dismiss all efforts to remove God from public life. 

Hal McKenzie (1948-2010) was the first editor of CosmicTribune.com.  

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