The First 11 Chapters

I recently listened to three sermons by Ken Ham from Answers In Genesis. Probably the most convincing talks I've heard that argue for a literal six day creation.

Some people laugh when you go on about dinosaurs, millions of years, evolution and all that jazz. Like it's just daft stuff, not real theology, and you just need to get past it. But Ham made a very interesting point in one of his talks... people read the first 11 chapters of the Bible and think it's ridiculous. And if the first 11 chapters of a book seem completely nuts, why would you keep reading?

On that basis, knowing a thing or two about dinosaurs, creation vs evolution and millions of years is actually fairly central to the gospel in our scientific age. If you can't get past the opening chapters of the opening book, you'll never get to Jesus.

Creed - by Steve Turner

I came across this poem in a Ravi Zacharias podcast. It makes some pretty amusing comments regarding the naturalistic worldviews that are so common in our secular culture:

Creed
by Steve Turner

We believe in Marx, Freud and Darwin
We believe everything is OK
as long as you don't hurt anyone
to the best of your definition of hurt,
and to the best of your knowledge.

We believe in sex before, during, and after marriage.
We believe in the therapy of sin.
We believe that adultery is fun.
We believe that sodomy’s OK.
We believe that taboos are taboo.

We believe that everything's getting better
despite evidence to the contrary.
The evidence must be investigated
And you can prove anything with evidence.

We believe there's something in horoscopes
UFO's and bent spoons.
Jesus was a good man just like Buddha,
Mohammed, and ourselves.
He was a good moral teacher though we think
His good morals were bad.

We believe that all religions are basically the same -
at least the one that we read was.
They all believe in love and goodness.
They only differ on matters of creation,
sin, heaven, hell, God, and salvation.

We believe that after death comes the Nothing
Because when you ask the dead what happens 
they say nothing.
If death is not the end, if the dead have lied, then it's
compulsory heaven for all
excepting perhaps
Hitler, Stalin, and Genghis Kahn

We believe in Masters and Johnson
What's selected is average.
What's average is normal.
What's normal is good.

We believe in total disarmament.
We believe there are direct links between warfare and bloodshed.
Americans should beat their guns into tractors.
And the Russians would be sure to follow.

We believe that man is essentially good.
It's only his behavior that lets him down.
This is the fault of society.
Society is the fault of conditions.
Conditions are the fault of society.

We believe that each man must find the truth that
is right for him.
Reality will adapt accordingly.
The universe will readjust.
History will alter.
We believe that there is no absolute truth
excepting the truth
that there is no absolute truth.

We believe in the rejection of creeds,
And the flowering of individual thought.

If chance be
the Father of all flesh,
disaster is his rainbow in the sky
and when you hear:

State of Emergency!
Sniper Kills Ten!
Troops on Rampage!
Whites go Looting!
Bomb Blasts School! 

It is but the sound of man worshipping his maker.

The Existence of God

"Think for a minute of a marble table in front of you. Do you think that, given a trillion years or infinite time, this table could suddenly or gradually become conscious, aware of it's surroundings, aware of its identity the way you are? It is simply inconceivable that this would or could happen. And the same goes for any kind of matter."
Antony Flew

Today one of my reoccurring brain-melting thoughts came back to me. I was on my lunch break staring at my empty coke bottle and realised that the fact that anything exists defies all logic. The glass bottle shouldn't exist. Neither should the table it's sitting on. Everything that exists must have been created by something preceeding it.

And therefore nothing should exist.

Not empty space, not time, not a vaccum, not even the colour black. They are all things that came from somewhere. The fact that existence exists is insane. But here we are, in an incredibly complex, finely tuned universe; and it defies all reason.

You cannot believe that the universe has always been there.

Whether you believe in a universe or a multiverse, or that the Big Bang / Big Crunch cycle has occurred millions of times; it all had to come from somewhere. Nothing comes from nothing. An eternally existing universe is inexplicable. An eternally existing God makes sense. It's not a 50-50 take your pick.

You can ask all the same questions about God which you ask about the universe. Where did God come from? What caused him to exist? How can he have no beginning? But God is spirit and he is completely separate from the universe. How can you reason through, study, understand or theorise about a being in which you have no scientific knowledge and can never observe? His existence is entirely different from ours in every way.

As Flew puts it, "God's existence is inexplicable to us, but not to God".

Antony Flew on Evolution

Some more from Antony Flew:

In my book Darwinian Evolution, I pointed out that natural selection does not positively produce anything. It only eliminates, or tends to eliminate, whatever is not competitive. A variation does not need to bestow any actual competitive disadvantage. To choose a rather silly illustration, suppose I have useless wings tucked away under my suit coat, wings that are too weak to lift my frame off the ground. Useless as they are, these wings do not enable me to escape predators or gather food. But as long as they don't make me more vulnerable to predators, I will probably survive to reproduce and pass on my wings to my descendants. Darwin's mistake in drawing too positive an inference with his suggestion that natural selection produces something was perhaps due to his employment of the expressions "natural selection" or "survival of the fittest" rather than his own ultimately preferred alternative, "natural preservation".

'There Is A God' by Antony Flew, p78-9

I also read a few years ago, I think in some Christian scientist magazine, that any mutation that did prove beneficial to an animal (something that's never been witnessed), within a few generations that mutation would become so dilute in the gene pool it would be as if it never occurred.

Antony Flew on the "Monkey Theorem"

Here is an outrageously long quote from Antony Flew, which I've included for the simple reason that it's really good, and I love it. Made a few highlights.

I was particularly impressed with Gerry Schroeder's point-by-point refutation of what I call the "monkey theorem." This idea, which has been presented in a number of forms and variations, defends the possibility of life arising by chance using the analogy of a multitude of monkeys banging away on computer keyboards and eventually ending up writing a Shakespearean sonnet.

Schroeder first referred to an experiment conducted by the British National Council of Arts. A computer was placed in a cage with six monkeys. After one month of hammering away at it (as well as using it as a bathroom!), the monkeys produced fifty typed pages – but not a single word in the English language. Schroeder noted that this was the case even though the shortest word in the English language is one letter (a or I). A is a word only if there is a space either side of it. If we take it that the keyboard has thirty characters (the twenty-six letters and other symbols), then the likelihood of getting a one-letter word is 30 times 30 times 30, which is 27,000. The likelihood of getting a one-letter word is one chance out of 27,000.

Schroeder then applied the probabilities to the sonnet analogy. "What's the chance of getting a Shakespearean sonnet?" he asked. He continued:


All the sonnets are the same length. They're by definition fourteen lines long. I picked the one I knew the opening line for, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" I counted the number of letters; there are 488 letters in that sonnet. What's the likelihood of hammering away and getting 488 letters in the exact sequence as in "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?"? What you end up with is 26 multiplied by itself 488 times – or 26 to the 488th power. Or, in other words, in base 10, 10 to the 690th.

[Now] the number of particles in the universe –  not grains of sand, I'm talking about protons, electrons and neutrons –  is 10 to the 80th. Ten to the 80th is 1 with 80 zeros after it. Ten to the 690th is 1 with 690 zeros after it. There are not enough particles in the universe to write down the trials; you'd be off by a factor of 10 to the 600th.

If you took the entire universe and converted it to computer chips –  forget the monkeys –  each one weighing a millionth of a gram and had each computer chip able to spin out 488 trials at, say, a million times a second [producing] random letters, the number of trials you would get since the beginning of time would be 10 to the 90th trials. It would be off again by a factor of 10 to the 600th. You will never get a sonnet by chance. The universe would have to be 10 to the 600th times larger. Yet the world just thinks the monkeys can do it every time.

After hearing Schroeder's presentation, I told him that he had very satisfactorily and decisively established that the "monkey theorem" was a load of rubbish, and that it was particularly good to do it with just a sonnet; the theorem is sometimes proposed using the works of Shakespeare or a single play, such as Hamlet. If the theorem won't work for a single sonnet, then of course it's simply absurd to suggest that the more elaborate feat of the origin of life could have been achieved by chance.

'There Is A God' by Antony Flew, p75-8

Over-confidence in a 3 lb brain

I'm thinking that an awful lot of people exert far more confidence in the three-pound brain that sits between their ears than they really should. Watching videos such as Powers Of 10 or The Awe Factor of God completely blows my mind.

Discovering how incredibly vast the universe is makes me immediately think how incredibly small we are. The earth isn't even a fleck of dust. We are nothing. It really gives a stark reminder of our insignificance and smallness.

If science has lead to these sorts of discoveries, why hasn't it lead to a greater humility? Why do you get Richard Dawkins trying to convince the world God doesn't exist when the vastness and the age of the universe is completely beyond comprehension? Makes me think that on some levels, the smarter you get, the stupider you get.

Nothing is more surprising than the passing of time.

People are always surprised at how quickly time flys by; and to the extent that 'time' almost seems unnatural. You look back at an old photo, and you can't believe that it was ten years ago.

I read a CS Lewis quote that said it's like a fish constantly being surprised by the wetness of water. The only possible reason for this constant, repetitive surprise is that it was never meant to be part of our existence. It's like a massive clue that we were created for eternity. We weren't meant to age, or have our bodies slowly ravaged by the toils of life.

"He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end."
Ecclesiastes 3:11

I love this verse. In the first instance it states that we have this innate sense of eternity, and in the second it declares that we're simply unable to comprehend how the universe came into existence. Seems to have massive implications on theories like evolution and the big bang. It's simply beyond our intelligence to understand, no matter how factual we present our theories.