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PULLMAN & BAD SCIENCE

Since Pullman has admitted that his stated goal is to undermine the Christian faith, it is no wonder that he cast heroic characters like Mary Malone, as a scientist who has turned her back on God and ends up serving the fallen angels. Satan's angels instruct her to play the part of the serpent in tempting Lyra. Malone tells Lyra that, "The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all" (Pullman, The Amber Spyglass, p. 441). At least Pullman admits through one of his heroes that the Christian faith is both powerful and convincing, because this can hardly be said of his comic revisionism.

Unfortunately it is Pullman's reliance on long-debunked and outdated science that becomes foundational to his con. Pullman, as we have discovered, teaches his audience that God came on the scene after matter was already in existence and organized, presumably from the eternal past. Many atheists gambled their eternal souls on the so-called "steady-state" theory that hypothesized that matter was eternal and not created. However today, even atheistic scientists who subscribe to the "big bang" theory now acknowledge the existence of a first cause that brought time, space and matter into existence. Einstein stated that he wrongly subscribed to a cosmology that assumed that the universe had no beginning. In fact, he admitted that his subscription to the theory of a "cosmological constant" had been the "biggest blunder" of his life. Einstein went on to claim that the existence of a creator was highly evident in the construction of the cosmos. As the renowned physicist, Stephen Hawking admitted, "So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose a creator." By adopting eternal matter and the now woefully outdated "steady state" hypothesis, atheists could do away with the idea of the "Authority," even as Satan in Paradise Lost sought to get those he was deceiving to believe that God did not create the universe. So Pullman offers nothing new, only false pseudo-science and snake oil.

Spontaneous generation is yet another scientific blunder that has been repudiated yet Pullman nevertheless adapts the pseudo-science into his fantasy as though it were a plausible reality. Atheists in the past denied creation by divine fiat and came up with the theory that life spontaneously generated out of dead matter. However, in the 19th century, Louis Pasteur and other scientist proved beyond a shadow of a doubt the theory of spontaneous generation categorically false. They demonstrated that life does not arise from non-life and complex cells and organisms do not spontaneously generate from dead matter. While scientist in the laboratory have longed proved this notion false, every day the laboratory life itself demonstrates the incontrovertible evidence for the law of biogenesis which states that life comes from life. This bears eloquent witness to the need for an eternal creator, a creator without a beginning or end, indeed, "from everlasting to everlasting."

The third scientific blunder that Pullman draws upon in his effort to kill God with his not- so-subtle knife, is the theory of alternative universes. Some atheists, in their effort to run from the evidence, have fantasized about alternative universes that are not dependent upon a beginning or the same known scientific laws that would demand a creator. In so doing, they are able to live in an alternative universe that exists only in their minds and ignore the evidence of the authority of a creator revealed through the things made in the known universe (Romans 1:18-32). Even though such theories only exist in the imaginations of men, they play naturally into Pullman's fantasy world as he seeks to deny the existence of God in his mind and in the minds of the children he is deluding.