The legendary atheist scientist, Stephen Hawking – y’know, the chap who invented time – prefaced his most famous book with an old story about how people can’t see the truth even when it stares them in the face. Here is the version of the story that Hawking used:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

We know by now that Prof. Hawking himself – a man for whom I once had profound respect, and in many ways still do – didn’t actually live up to his own professed ideals about seeking the truth and coming to mathematically supported conclusions. Among Prof. Hawking’s last works was a book called The Grand Design, in which he rather grandiosely (heh) proclaimed that, essentially, the Universe created itself out of nothing, just because it could, and required no Creator to make it all happen.

That shows very clearly how easily a so-called “seeker of truth” can be fooled into spouting a lot of absolute nonsense.

By definition, a creator sits apart from his creation, even though it is a reflection of him. Take a look at your son or daughter. Does your child contain part of you? Most assuredly – in physical, mental, moral, and spiritual dimensions, part of you is unquestionably in your creation.

But does that mean that your creation is the same as you? Do you sit inside of your creation? Of course not. The very notion is as absurd as saying that your son’s LEGO fort – complete with space lasers and SOOPER DOOPER AMAZEBALLS AWESOMESAUCE STARFIGHTERS THAT RUN ON MAGIC AND WHOOSH NOISES – is in fact the same as your son.

Layers Upon Layers

Essentially, Prof. Hawking’s mistake involved piling layers on top of layers to build a bad logical argument on very dubious foundations. This is a classic mistake of those who believe in lies and narrate lies.

There are many ways to discern the truth, all of them effective and most of them simple (but not easy) to use. Probably the fastest and most effective way discern that which is true can be expressed in the classic form of Ockham’s Razor:

Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

This is merely an old formulation of an even older series of formulations, but they all come back to the same thing. Whenever you confront a system of thought or ideas that sounds fancy and beautiful, always subject it to the test of parsimony. Check its underlying assumptions. If the assumptions upon which someone’s worldview sits are too great, or too complex, or easily knocked down by empirical and logical tests, then you are dealing with a sophist and a fraud.

It’s just that simple.

The Epicyclical Test

To this principle I will add one corollary – though not, I readily admit, necessarily an ironclad one:

The probability that a system of thought or philosophy is false, increases exponentially with every epicycle needed to support the system.

By “epicycle“, I mean that the philosopher’s system has to be placed within additional systems, simply to make it all tenable and sensible.

The “Flat Earth” crowd are a good example of this issue. Yes, certain people can possibly make a good argument that the Earth is flat – despite literally mountains of evidence to the contrary. They’ll even sound pretty convincing and capable of formulating an actual rational argument

When you come at them with that evidence, such as the fact that astronauts floating in multiple space stations over something like 50 years have all seen a globe rotating beneath them with no evidence whatsoever of some kind of cosmic plate held up by any kind of force, they will then resort to additional systems built on top of their existing system in order to justify their point of view.

Try it out sometime. If you find a Flat-Earther and try to engage him in debate, you will quickly find that he will be more slippery than a greasy weasel.

That is because he will resort to the CLASSIC attempt by a liar to reframe the debate on grounds more favourable to him. When you learn how to recognise this issue, you can cut straight to the heart of the matter by dismantling or even outright ignoring that nonsense, and attacking the fundamental assumptions of the argument.

Let’s put this corollary to the test:

1. The Izzlamist Heresy

The entire false religion of Islam depends on the following strong assumptions:

1. There existed a man named Muhammad born in Mecca in or around 570 AD;
2. He was an orphan who was raised by his uncle as part of the wealthy pagan Hashem clan of merchants and traders, living in the Hejaz region;
3. At the age of 40, he received a series of revelations from the angel Gabriel (Jibreel, in Izzlamist terms) in the cave of Hira, outside of Mecca, which showed him the “perfected” form of the ultimate revelation of God;
4. Everything that he learned and heard was written down by others into the perfect copy of the perfect book, known today as the Koran;
5. His companions carried on his word after he died in 632 AD and established the Rashidun caliphate of “rightly-guided caliphs”, ruling until 664 AD;
6. The sayings, traditions, interpretations, and biography of Muhammed are contained within, respectively, the hadith, the tafsir, the tahriq, and the sirah, which are authoritative and absolute;

Every one of these assumptions can be put to the test. And Islam will FAIL every single test, as I have repeatedly pointed out over the years. But the probability of failing those tests was already quite high, given how many clear assumptions form the basis of the faith.

However, that, in and of itself, is not sufficient. Islamic apologists – the dawahgandists – have to keep adding layer upon layer to make their false religion seem even remotely sensible.

When you challenge any of their assumptions using actual evidence and data from history, archaeology, science, or even Scripture, they have only 3 basic responses:

• Run and hide, refusing to engage in any way, while insisting that any glaringly obvious contradictions between Islam’s claims and reality are “metaphysical matters”;
• Create a straw-man to rebut, attack that in order to distract from attention, and then jump up and down yelling about their “victory” over the hated kaffir;
• Resort to a circular for of argument looking at their own traditions from the 8th, 9th, and 10th Centuries, claiming that these are authentic revelations from a 7th Century man-made religion;

Here, for example, is a particularly egregious example of the stupidity of an Islamist’s “arguments”:

2. The Theory of Evolution by (Probably) Natural Selection

Charles Darwin’s legendary theory of evolution essentially argued that environmental selection pressures would force the propagation of characteristics found in the individuals of a species that are best adapted to their present environments. That, in and of itself, is not actually particularly controversial – this is microevolution, in which small changes occur over relatively short time periods in the physical characteristics of members of a species.

However, Darwin went a big step further and then claimed that random mutations over long periods of time would result in completely new species and structures. And that aspect of the theory is HUGELY controversial – though Darwinists will heap scorn and opprobrium upon you for saying this.

Unfortunately for the Darwinists, the evidence directly contradicts everything that they believe:

The reality is that macroevolution cannot work. There is not enough time in the ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE for it to work. Subsequent innovations in population genetics, molecular biology, and the discovery of an incredibly complex and powerful form of “code” in the form of DNA that determines how life functions, have shown that evolution by natural selection simply cannot work.

Moreover, the field of epigenetics, which looks (among other things) at how body structures work and function, has shown pretty conclusively that, in order for an animal form to work. The basic consequence of epigenetic findings is that a fish cannot become a bird, because the materials and structures that have to be there for both forms to function are entirely incompatible with each other.

How have Darwinists responded to these severe challenges to their worldview? By adding ever greater layers to the basic theory to make it stick together. Our Beloved and Dreaded Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH) Vox Day the Merciless and Terrible coined an (extremely awkward) acronym for the current “modern evolutionary synthesis”, which goes something like:

TE(p)NSBMGDSSaGF : the Theory of Evolution by (Probably) Natural Selection, Biological Mutation, Genetic Drift, Sexual Selection, and Gene Flow.

3. Christianity

Since I have directly criticised two dogmas that directly attack the divinity and person of the Lord Jesus Christ, intellectual integrity and honesty require that I at least look at the epicycles, if any, surrounding the True Faith.

To do this, we have to strip away all of the nonsense and layers and rituals that various churches and traditions have added onto the basic message of Jesus Christ.

What is that message?

• Mankind is sinful, broken, and Fallen.
• God wants to be reconciled with His Creation, which He has given complete free will to accept, or reject, Him as we please.
• Because God is literally the antithesis of sin, because He cannot STAND to be around sin and corruption, He could not intervene directly in the mortal realm.
• Mankind, being by definition fatally flawed and doomed to death, could not save itself through its own inventions and ideas.
• Therefore, the only possible way for God to save His Creation would be to enter into it – not as God, but as a man, to experience and fully understand the human experience, because God Himself is so utterly different from His own Creation.

God, after all, is infinite, especially from the perspective of His Creation. He sits outside of His Creation. To understand His Creation fully, He therefore had to diminish Himself and enter that Creation.

Which is precisely what He did. And He offered Himself up as a sacrifice, essentially, to Himself – as a way for taking literally all of the sins of Mankind upon Himself as the only possible way to wash those sins clean.

Examine these basic tenets very closely. The remarkable thing about them is that no epicycles are needed to make it all hang together. Looking at the Scriptures from start to finish – beginning with Genesis 1:1 and going all the way to Revelation 22:21 – the truly remarkable fact about them is just how logically consistent they are.

And that is precisely why so many people reject them.

If you look at the early history of the church fathers, you will find that, when they went to the Greeks, in particular, to witness and minister to them and convert them, the Greeks actually laughed at the early Christians. Why? Because the Greeks loved complex and fancy philosophies. The idea of a God who became Man, died for men, and rose again, seemed so stupid, so unsophisticated, and so simple, that they largely rejected it.

That is a system without need for epicycles. Which is a pretty bloody strong sign that it is probably true.

Conclusion – Simple is Best

Just as with the Flat Earth movement, if you come across a system of thought that requires multiple layers of added complexity to make it work – especially layers that you cannot directly test and check for yourself – then you have pretty strong assurances that this system doesn’t actually work. The simplest explanations are generally the best.

That does not mean that such explanations must not be tested. They absolutely must be. Every claim made by the Scriptures can and must be rigorously checked. Which is precisely what Christians have been doing for two thousand years – and our book, and our man, who is God, have withstood EVERY test.

Can other systems claim the same? Coming back to Prof. Hawking, his field of theoretical physics has a branch called “M-theory”, which most of us know as “string theory”. This is one of several attempts by physicists to come up with a unified “Theory of Everything”, that combines all four fundamental forces (three, these days, since most think of the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces as a single “electroweak” force) with a reconciliation of the seemingly absolutely opposed fields of quantum mechanics and general relativity.

(For non-scientists, one major reason why the two cannot sit together is because the two fields work on completely different scales – the former at the atomic level and smaller, the latter at the molecular level and larger. The two are not compatible. And yet the Universe somehow hangs together, does it not?)

The big problem with M-theory is that, while it is indeed very elegant and brilliant in mathematical terms, it only works in a system of more than 4 dimensions. Those extra dimensions are neither visible nor testable by any of us. So we can’t figure out how to verify those findings. And precisely because we can’t verify those findings, M-theorists can concoct the wildest of fantasies, including infinite multiverses, that eliminate the need for God and for a Creator, and which embrace “spontaneous creation”.

Is that likely to be true? Again, given how complex that system is, and given how hard the whole thing is to understand… probably not.

Therefore, when you hear philosophers and “scientists” talking up a grand new theory or system that requires multiple layers of mutually reinforcing ideas in order to make it work… you are almost surely dealing with a false doctrine.