Total proof

I have to say that experiencing the birth of a child has to go down as total proof that God exists. At the beginning of this year Beth, my daughter, didn't exist in anyway. She had no soul, she had no body, no mind, no personality, no character. But one little act of love and BOOM!... she starts growing, rapidly, with unbelievable design and complexity. Nothing that man has ever created could be as awesome and as intricate as a baby. She's alive. Living, breathing, fully conscious and self-aware. She's beautiful.

If ever there needed to be total proof that this universe was created by a Great Designer, this is it. Billions of years and random chance could never create a baby. Especially not Beth.

A hope that crushes

Over the last couple of years I've seen a few friends of mine really struggle with health, in ways that are quite gut-wrenching. Your heart just goes out to them.

What I find quite paradoxical is that a lot of the suffering inflicted is actually due to the advances we've made in modern medicine. We are offered hope in what would have been totally hopeless situations a few hundred years ago. But sometimes it's just a flicker of hope, a percentage, a chance. You have to fight, battle and strive. And then cope with the crushing disappointment if it doesn't happen, or the problem is never truly overcome.

Sometimes there's no end, no final resolution, no way of moving on. Because treatment still offers some hope, the battle is never over.

Modern science and medicine is amazing though. But you really have to take the good with the bad. Last month, an emergency c-section probably stopped my wife from dying in childbirth. Incredible. Open heart surgery saved my brothers life. But cancer still claimed my Granddad when he was 58. Some situations work out really well. Others open you up to the torture of hope, met with failed treatment. Sometimes that flicker of hope seems to loom slightly out of reach and never delivers.

God, we need you!

Randy Alcorn on Naturalistic Assumptions

"We succumb to naturalistic assumptions that what we see is real and what we don't see isn't. God can't be real, we conclude, because we can't see him. And Heaven can't be real because we can't see it. But we must recognise our blindness. The blind must take by faith that there are stars in the sky. If they depend on their ability to see, they will conclude there are no stars"
Heaven, Randy Alcorn, page 13

Only One Question

There's so many questions surrounding Christianity like pain and suffering, the Big Bang, evolution and the hiddenness of God. There's so many things that clutter your mind. But what you realise after a while is that everything stacks behind this one big question.

Was Jesus Christ the Son of God?

If he was, and is, nothing is impossible.

The belief that a man can be subject to the most brutal and complete death, entombed, and then raised back to life three days later is one that is totally miraculous. That sort of thing just doesn't happen. But it did. According to Josh McDowell it is the most well documented fact in history. (See his book, The Resurrection Factor).

If Jesus Christ was God himself, all these other questions become secondary.

Does God exist? Absolutely.
Is the universe six thousand or thirteen billion years old? Either. He could create it in an instant.
Is the Bible the perfect word of God? Jesus seems to think so.
Is there a reason and an answer for every question you could possibly think of? There absolutely must be.

So all in all, Jesus really is the cornerstone. Every line of thought, every reason, every question and answer stems from him. When it comes to his divinity, we have an inexplicable sum of evidence, and no explanation to the contrary.

Fear

Last thursday at Life Group we watched the Francis Chan 'Basic Series' on the fear of the Lord. The week leading up to it I was chewing it all over, and it's been really good. I've done a few talks on the fear of the Lord before but this DVD has thrown some extra verses into the mix and shed further light. As it happens, the fear of God plays out in some quite unexpected ways.

One of the things that really strikes you from the DVD is how fearful of God we should really be. My gut reaction is this: I have a certain level of fear, but nowhere near enough.

"When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead"
Revelation 1:17a

Francis Chan relates to all these biblical characters that had an encounter with God and were absolutely terrified. Even when people see Angels in the bible they're nearly scared to death. All of this leaves certain questions spinning round your mind:

Should I have that terrifying level of fear?
Is it even possible?
Is it even appropriate for daily life?
Does it not conflict with all the hope and promise we have in Jesus Christ, that we are in fact reconciled to God, and can boldly approach his throne? (Hebrews 4:16)

On the one hand you would have to conclude that the appropriate level of fear would probably kill you. Like in Exodus 33:18-23, Moses isn't allowed to see God's face, only his back, because no one could survive that. Part of my speculation on the hiddenness of God is that it's not his plan to terrify us on a daily basis.

But on the other hand a certain level of fear is prescribed. Without it, you wouldn't even be a Christian.

"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline."
Proverbs 1:7

"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow his precepts have good understanding. To him belongs eternal praise."
Psalm 111:10

Some musings

These two verses highlight some really interesting points. Firstly, why is the fear of God the beginning of knowledge and wisdom? It must lay the foundation for everything else. If we don't understand that the universe and humanity was designed and created by an awesome God, all of our knowledge runs astray.

You can be really, really intelligent in the same way that you can run really fast in completely the wrong direction. All these scientific, social, biological, philosophical theories are constructed, but they miss vital ingredients and it changes everything.

Secondly, in the first verse, why does it say 'fools despise wisdom and discipline'? Surely it should say 'fools despise the LORD'. I would guess that wisdom and discipline both imply a change of lifestyle. It feels restrictive. Fools hate the idea.

But this has some personal implications. To what degrees, as Christians, are we fools? What areas do we despise wisdom and hate discipline? We've all got areas where we accommodate all sorts of sin and disobedience, lack of discipline, lack of fear. It's so easy to read about 'fools' in the bible and not think you're one of them.

Fear of God equals faith

"Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows."
Matthew 10:28-31

This concept of fear is not just an Old Testament, Old Covenant thing. Here Jesus himself, in the New Testament, tells us to fear. But the theme develops.

He says “be afraid” and then “don’t be afraid”.

We have one type of fear that conquers all others.

And this seems to rather aptly answer the question 'what level of fear is appropriate?'. Our fear of God should quench all others. When we're on the same team as God, when eternity is secured, even death is now an upgrade. In the verse above, the threat of murder is completely annulled. Fear of God equals faith in God.

The fear of the LORD is the weight behind us

"What, then, shall we say in response to this?
If God is for us, who can be against us?"
Romans 8:31

It’s not just Christians who should fear God. It’s everyone. If we could really grasp how terrifyingly awesome our God is, we might understand the depth of our confidence in Him.

And finally...

The fear of the LORD equals life

"The fear of the LORD leads to life: then one rests content, untouched by trouble."
Proverbs 19:23

That sounds unbelievably good. Life, rest, contentment, peace – untouched by trouble even if surrounded by it.

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

Antony Flew on DNA

The following is a long quote from Antony Flew's book title "There is a God: how the world's most notorious atheist changed his mind".

The last of my public debates, a symposium at New York University, occurred in May 2004 ... To the surprise of all concerned, I announced at the start that I now accepted the existence of a God ... In the video of the symposium, the announcer suggested that of all the great discoveries of modern science, the greatest was God.

In this symposium, when asked if recent work on the origin of life pointed to the activity of a creative Intelligence, I said:


Yes, I now think it does ... almost entirely because of the DNA investigations. What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinary diverse elements to work together. It's the enormous complexity of the number of elements and the enormous subtlety of the ways they work together. The meeting of these two parts at the right time by chance is simply minute. It is all a matter of the enormous complexity by which the results we achieved, which looked to me like the work of intelligence."

'There Is A God' by Antony Flew, p74-5

Is God outside of time? (Part 2)

I went to a seminar by Michael Ramsden (European director of RZIM Zacharias Trust) at Momentum and asked him if he thought God was outside of time. Interestingly, he was certain that He was, talking about the space-time continuum being part of creation, and that God was external to this.

Apparently Christians have been saying for centuries that time had a finite beginning (rather than something that always existed). And this idea had been ridiculed by secular thinking. Until, of course, the Big Bang theory. This initially scared a lot of scientists because it confirmed Christian thought on time. Many of them rallied against the theory because they didn't want anything that seemed to confirm the biblical account of creation.

Anyway – bible verses – always useful! Michael Ramsden mentioned that there are four verses in the New Testament that talk about God existing before the 'age of time', i.e. before time was actually created. I've done my best to find them:

1 Corinthians 2:7
No, we speak of God's secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began.

2 Timothy 1:9
This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time.

Titus 1:2
a faith and knowledge resting on the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time.

Jude 1:25
through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever.

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.