I am watching less and less broadcast TV, but there are plenty of interesting things available on other platforms. For example, the newspaper Sydney Morning Herald offers a programme called "The Trouble with Atheism" by an English journalist called Rod Liddle.
This programme is not a defence of religion, but it points out the limits of the questions that science can answer.
A few points that I remember from the programme are:
One of the most used arguments against religion is that Darwin gives a scientific explanation to phenomena which previously seemed to require God. However, Darwin's theories are not unchanging, and are being refined by people such as Professor Jeffrey H. Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh who is trying to better understand how new features of a living species come into being.
David Stack, a historian from Reading University examines the influence of Darwin on 19th and 20th century thinking, and some of it is not pretty. For example, Darwin's cousin, Sir Francis Galton was encouraged by Darwin's ideas to examine the traits of various populations, such as criminals and certain races. This work became known as the science of Eugenics. As Rod Liddle says, if there are suggestions that the result of work like this is that certain human populations should be sterilised or reduced in some way, most people reject the idea. But is it science that makes us reject it or something else?
Some scientists examine what happened in the few seconds after the Big Bang, but they have nothing to say about the second before it. The philosophy of existence is different to the scientific search for mechanisms.
I would recommend watching this programme, it is a useful test of the claim that science will answer all our problems and provide a rational guide to life. As Hamlet said, "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
God often seems a little bit shy at absolutely revealing Himself. Even when you get a prayer answered, unless it's an absolute miracle, God often answers it in a way that makes you sometimes wonder whether maybe it was going to happen anyway. Even in the gospels, Jesus is reluctant to produce miracles for the authorities. So I suppose God has perhaps left a few ambiguous mysteries here and there, but has done a perfect cover-up job concealing absolute proof of His existence from the authoritative scientists. Regards ChrisM.
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