The Good News Newspaper

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Josh Timonen once travelled the world with the world’s most famous atheist, Richard Dawkins, launched his website and filmed many of his videos. Dawkins even dedicated his book The Greatest Show on Earth to Josh.

In hindsight, Josh describes atheism as “a really useful worldview for weak men. Externally you are going with the flow. You are part of the secular culture. You’re in agreement. And that’s a very safe herd position to be in.”

But during the Covid pandemic, he saw some of his atheist friends defending the looting and rioting that accompanied the Black Lives Matter protests. He told Living Waters that he was shocked by “their acceptance of evil”.

He was still an atheist but wanted some moral foundations for his young family, and began to attend church with his family. Initially, it was only because he saw the social benefits of Christianity, including the “community and nice people”. He had no intention of accepting what he called at the time “the crazy stuff in the Bible”. 

But then he began to actually read the Bible for himself, and later a book by a former atheist, Lee Strobel, who laid out the evidence for Jesus in The Case for Christ. Josh describes this as “a major turning point”. He had to face the fact that “Jesus was real… Jesus actually lived, he actually died, and he actually rose”. 

Convinced, he became a committed Christian. Young in the faith, he admits he doesn’t have all the answers to atheistic objections, but says: “I accept Jesus is who he says he is” – God become man, who died to save all who will trust in him.

You can read the full story in November's Good News newspaper or on our website at www.goodnews-paper.org.uk/viewlatesteditionpage.htm

One of the most outspoken critics of religion has changed her mind and now proudly speaks of her new Christian faith. 

Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali was a key player in New Atheism and a friend of Richard Dawkins. An award-winning author, she is a former Dutch politician and human rights campaigner. In 2008, she was awarded the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for women's freedom.

Some wondered if her conversion was just an intellectual decision rather than a personal faith. 

However, more recently she has described her depression lifting as “a miracle”, has a new appreciation of the great love of God, and has opened up about her deeply personal encounter with God. 

Ayaan remains critical of other religions, but now realises that she used to misunderstand faith in Jesus when she was an atheist. “The message of Christianity I get is that it's a message of love. It's a message of redemption. And it's a story of renewal and rebirth. 

“So, Jesus dying and rising again for me symbolises that story. In a small way I felt I had died and I was [re]born. That story of redemption, and rebirth, I think makes Christianity actually a very, very powerful story for the human condition and human existence." 

You can read more of her story in September's Good News newspaper or on our website www.goodnews-paper.org.uk/viewlatesteditionpage.htm 

Science writer Jonathan Wells, whose PhD in molecular and cell biology was from UC Berkeley, deid in September. He was a whistleblower who devoted his career to exposing mistakes and untruths in the evidence for evolution.

His most famous book, Icons of Evolution (published in 2000), tackled the arguments and illustrations in school and university biology textbooks. He showed that pieces of research that have been trumpeted as classic evidence for evolution for decades do not in fact support it. 

Wells’ work was bitterly resented by evolutionists, who belittled his discoveries as “politically motivated exaggeration and misrepresentation of a scattering of minor issues”. 

Yet a New York Times article in 2001, ‘Biology Text Illustrations More Fiction Than Fact’, showed that Wells’ criticisms were justified. Obviously based on Wells’ painstaking research, the Times article admitted that “the anti-evolution movement called intelligent design has helped its cause by publicising some embarrassing mistakes in leading biology textbooks”. 

Wells followed Icons of Evolution up with, among others, The Myth of Junk DNA in 2011. Junk DNA was another ‘icon’, based on the idea that this ‘junk’ in our cells was the useless leftovers signifying millions of years of genetic waste from evolutionary processes. Although he wasn’t the first to predict that this DNA would prove to be useful information, designed by the Maker, his book was vindicated because major research by mainstream scientists in the years since have shown that most of the so-called ‘junk’ DNA is not rubbish at all, but functional, serving different purposes in the body. 

According to Evolution News, Wells summarised his view of science in this way: 

“Science can mean testing hypotheses by comparing them with evidence. It’s a search for the truth. That’s the science I love. But there’s another kind of science that has become popular nowadays and that’s finding materialistic [non-God] explanations for everything. That’s materialistic science not empirical science. For empirical science the evidence matters the most. For materialistic science, the story matters the most.”

'Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free'(John 8 verse 32)

You can find this article in January's Good News newspaper or on our website at www.goodnews-paper.org.uk

One of the world’s top chemists recently challenged ten of the world’s leading origin of life researchers to produce evidence for their theories – and all failed to produce any.

Dr James Tour, who is Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science and Nanoengineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas, wanted the evolutionary scientists to “put up or shut up”. Tour believes that life cannot simply ‘emerge’ from non-life, however many billions of years evolutionists give it.

Science writer David Coppedge says: “For a couple of years, Tour has bypassed the censors in the journals by posting detailed videos on his YouTube channel debunking ‘chemical evolution’… Yet the leading naturalistic origin-of-life researchers have not stopped misleading the public… claiming they are getting warmer at explaining how life evolved in a primordial soup. Some leading chemical evolutionists, including Steve Benner, have responded indirectly with their own YouTube videos, but not face to face with Tour.”

Tour concludes that the belief that life can just pop into existence, given the right chemicals and environment, has no scientific justification – yet this is the line pumped out to the public by all major scientific institutions and schools, and the foundation on which Darwin’s theory of evolution rests.

Dr Tour, meanwhile, is an outstanding success in practical science as well as theory. He has authored 680 scientific publications and holds more than 120 patents. In 2014, Thomson Reuters named him one of ‘The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds’. He won the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Centenary Prize for innovations in materials chemistry, and is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He is also a committed Christian who says: “I stand in awe of God because of what he has done through his creation. My faith has been increased through my research.”

You can read this article in January's Good News newspaper or on our website at www.goodnews-paper.org.uk

ONE of the pre-eminent scientists studying the origins of life this month launches a new book presenting ground-breaking evidence for the existence of God.

In The Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries Revealing the Mind Behind the Universe*, Dr Stephen C Meyer reveals the latest breakthroughs in physics, cosmology and biology.

Meyer, a former geophysicist and college professor with a Cambridge PhD in the philosophy of #science, is at the forefront of Intelligent Design Theory and his last book, Darwin’s Doubt, was a New York Times bestseller.
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READ MORE in the latest edition of Good News evangelistic newspaper (goodnews-paaper.org.uk )

Nobel prize-winner, and professor of Physics at Cambridge University, Brian Josephson commending the new book on intelligent design by Dr Stephen Meyer, says: “This book makes it clear that far from being an unscientific claim, intelligent design is valid science.” The book, the Return of the God Hypothesis, outlines the latest discoveries in science and explains why they indicate not only a Creator but a personal God like the one in the Bible.

But Josephson is far from the only top scientist to back intelligent design.
John C Walton, a Fellow of The Royal Society of Edinburgh and Research Professor of Chemistry at the University of St Andrews, says Meyer’s book “persuasively shows that the God hypothesis is the best explanation of the fine-tuned, information-laden universe. The book does irreparable damage to atheist rhetoric.”
Marcos N Eberlin, Professor of Chemistry at Mackenzie University and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, says the book is “a marvellous compendium of indisputable scientific evidence in support of the existence of God”.
Eric Hedin, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Ball State University, states: “The chance of life originating on its own by natural processes is zero.”
There’s a list of over 1,000 PhD-level scientists who don’t believe that Darwinism adequately explains the complexity of life at dissentfromdarwin.org, but there are many more who haven’t made a public declaration because some have lost their jobs for supporting intelligent design.

www.goodnews-paper.org.uk

TV scientist Professor Brian Cox recently said he thinks we are alone in our galaxy because the chance of complex life evolving is vanishingly small.

Cox believes it needed extraordinary circumstances for human life to evolve – so he doesn’t think it has been repeated elsewhere: “The biologists I know think that it was such a freak occurrence that anything got multicellular"

Cox calls multicellular life “a freak”. But it’s also true that the chances of single-celled life emerging by accident from lifeless chemicals are virtually zero. Add to that the calculation by mathematicians that there has not been enough time in the universe for life to have evolved, and it’s clear that there is a big problem with the evolution story.

It may take far more faith to believe that life started and developed by accident than it does to believe in a Creator, according to Good News editor, Andrew Halloway. Superficially, he believes, evolution can seem like a defence for atheism. But the deeper you look, the more you find that science confirms there must be a God.

You can read more of Andrew's editorial in the August issue of the Good News newspaper, or on our website at www.goodnews-paper.org.uk

IN LAST month’s Write Angle I explained how the atheist Stephen Hawking’s research actually boosted the evidence for a Creator.

Now it appears that his last academic paper also undermines an argument against God.

In A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation? Hawking and his co-author Thomas Hertog proposed “strict limits to the kind of universes that populate the multiverse”.

The ‘multiverse’ is a hypothetical group of innumerable universes that may exist alongside our own. I stress ‘hypothetical’ because the evidence for them is weak to non-existent, yet the multiverse has risen in popularity in scientific circles.

So how does Hawking reducing the variety of possible universes undermine atheism?

Well, the problem is that the multiverse was a way of explaining the fine tuning of the universe and the Earth without the need for a Creator. You see, one of the most inexplicable facts about the Earth and the universe is that they have the exact conditions necessary for life. If just one of many different physical factors were different, by incredibly minute amounts, we would not be here.
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YOU can read the rest of this article in Good News: goodnewspaper.org.uk - order copies of the July edition!

Famous atheist Richard Dawkins used to say that the best evidence for evolution was that organisms that are similar to each other have similar DNA.

This, he claimed, supported Charles Darwin’s proposed ‘tree of life’, which claimed different plants and animals diversified from a common ancestor into different species, over millions of years of evolution. Dawkins believed this all happened by chance, so we didn’t need God to explain our existence.

Darwin’s theory came a long time before we knew what DNA was, or that it made our genes and our bodies. Yet Dawkins claimed that genetic research proved the tree of life was real: creatures that were closest together in evolutionary history had the closest genes and DNA. 

Even when he wrote this, the evidence was weak. In the very same year, New Scientist magazine ran an article with the title: “Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life”. In it, scientists said that the tree of life is “wrong” and “misleading” because Darwin’s theory limits and even obscures the study of organisms and their ancestries.

As technology has improved, it’s become easier to “read” the genes of many different species and it’s even clearer that this “best evidence for evolution” does not exist. 

“Now, years later, scientists have sequenced a great number of whole genomes.” 

Casey Luskin, the Associate Director of the Centre for Science and Culture, wrote for Evolution News. “As a consequence, they know that Dawkins was wrong. Every gene does not deliver ‘approximately the same tree of life’.”

In fact, DNA research does not show a ‘tree of life’ but many ‘bushes of life’. This mirrors the fossil record, where fully-formed creatures suddenly appear in the rocks and stay largely the same, with only minor variations, until they go extinct. 

Even back in the 1970s, a whole new theory was put together by evolutionists to account for this problem for Darwinism, called ‘punctuated equilibrium’. This recognised that there are long periods of ‘equilibrium’ – no change in organisms – punctuated by sudden, rapid evolution. But as they couldn’t find a convincing mechanism for how evolution could be so rapid, all the theory did was highlight that the fossils reveal very little in the way of ‘missing links’, and are far more a record of what you would expect if organisms were created from scratch, and only diversified in minor ways due to the genetic variety they were already given.

You can read more of this article in August's Good News newspaper.