Seeking Proof Finding Grace

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This week we ask the question, why is it that we can recognize the hand of intelligence when we look at an assembly line of complex machines that make potato chips, but we just take for granted that the microscopic machines, the cells, that make up us somehow came into being by random chance?  Once again the fingerprint of a Creator who loves us keeps coming into greater clarity as we look at the purpose and complexity of the cell.

“Nevertheless, it may be that the origin of life is not the only major gap in the evolutionary story that is bridged by sheer luck, anthropically justified.  For example, my colleague, Mark Ridley in Mendel’s Demon has suggested that the origin of the eukaryotic cell (our kind of cell, with a nucleus and various other complicated features such as mitochondria, which are not present in bacteria) was an even more momentous, difficult and statistically improbable step than the origin of life…Natural selection works because it is a cumulative one-way street to improvement.  It needs some luck to get it started, and the ‘billions of planets’ anthropic principle grants it that luck.  Maybe a few later gaps in the evolutionary story also need major infusions of luck, with anthropic justification.  Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2008

“Firstly, life – even a single, ‘simple’ cell – is a miracle of complexity.  Every cell in your body, for example, has molecular machines for moving itself, tagging and transporting molecules, processing food, defending against invaders, DNA duplication and repair, producing proteins and receiving and processing outside signals.  On top of all that, this entire machine can tear itself in half and produce a complete working copy in about 20 minutes.  Lewis and Barnes, A Fortunate Universe, 2016

“The cell can be thought of as a colossal factory, a city even, a Rube Goldberg contraption of interconnected assembly lines, machines, highways, transporters, blueprints, and more.  It would be extremely surprising if life on Earth went to all that bother if life is easy to make.” Lewis and Barnes, A Fortunate Universe, 2016

“The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”  Fred Hoyle, Hoyle on evolution, Nature, Vol. 294, No. 5837 (November 12, 1981), p. 105

“…Tompa and Rose have demonstrated mathematically that even having all the requisite parts for a cell will not ensure that those ingredients will self-organize into a living system.  Instead, the cell, like the individual genes or proteins, faces an extreme combinational problem.  Tompa and Rose calculate, building on the work of protein scientist Cyrus Levinthal, that there are a whopping 10^79,000,000,000 different ways of combining just the proteins in a relatively simple unicellular yeast.  That number only grows exponentially larger when biologists attempt to calculate the number of possible ways of combining all the proteins and all the other large molecular components necessary for that one-celled organism, including DNA and RNA molecules, ribosomes, lipids and glycolipid molecules, and others.  The number of possible combinations of these cellular components vastly exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe (10^80) and even the number of events since the big bang (10^139).”  Stephen Meyer, The Return of the God Hypothesis, 2021

This week we continue to look at the scientifically disproven examples that supposedly support Darwin’s theory that continue to be sold to us in textbooks and in popular culture today.  Could it be that an intelligent creator who loves us is a far better explanation?

Resources:

Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator, 2004

Stephen Meyer, The Return of the God Hypothesis, 2021

Hugh Ross, Improbable Planet, 2016

Jay Richards and Guillermo Gonzales, The Privileged Planet, 2004

I realized while preparing the last two episodes that they are in many ways a summary of the interview Lee Strobel conducts in the Case for a Creator.  I want to give full credit to Lee Strobel for doing an amazing job introducing this topic into my awareness and helping encourage me to dig deeper with some of the other resources listed.

“First, why, if species have descended from other species by fine graduations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms?  Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?” Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species, 1859

“Experimental evidence of such an evolution being impossible, the professor is not content to say (as most of us would be ready to say) that such an evolution is likely enough anyhow.  He produces his little bone, or little collection of bones, and deduces the most marvelous things from it.  He found in Java a piece of a skull, seeming by its contour to be smaller than the human.  Somewhere near it he found an upright thighbone and in the same scattered fashion some teeth that were not human…If they all form part of one creature, which is doubtful, our conception of the creature would be almost equally doubtful.  But the effect on popular science was to produce a complete and even complex figure, finished down to the last details of hair and habits.  He was given a name as if he were an ordinary historical character.  People talked of Pithecanthropus as of Pitt or Fox or Napoleon.  Popular histories published portraits of him like the portraits of Charles the First or George the Fourth…A detailed drawing was reproduced, carefully shaded, to show that the very hairs of his head were all numbered.  No uninformed person looking at its carefully lined face and wistful eyes would imagine for a moment that this was the portrait of a thighbone, or of a few teeth and a fragment of a cranium.”  G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 1925

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This week we look at Charles Darwin’s tree of life and shockingly find out that what it purports to show of what the fossil record should look like is not remotely what the fossil record actually looks like.  It turns out that the Cambrian Explosion pretty much wiped out Darwin’s tree.  From here you can see the fingerprint of life and God’s love for us.

Resources:

Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator, 2004

Stephen Meyer, The Return of the God Hypothesis, 2021

Hugh Ross, Improbable Planet, 2016

Jay Richards and Guillermo Gonzales, The Privileged Planet, 2004

I realized while preparing the next two episodes that they are in many ways a summary of the interview Lee Strobel conducts in the Case for a Creator.  I want to give full credit to Lee Strobel for doing an amazing job introducing this topic into my awareness and helping encourage me to dig deeper with some of the other resources listed.

“The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations, has been urged by several paleontologists…as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of the species.  If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection...But we continually overrate the perfection of the geological record, and falsely infer, because of certain genera or families have not been found beneath a certain stage, that they did not exist before that stage.  In all cases, positive paleontological evidence may be implicitly trusted; negative evidence is worthless, as experience has so often shown.  Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859 

“To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to those assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer.”  Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859

“The Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years, are the oldest ones in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups.  And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear.  It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.”  Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design, 1987  

“Although the Cambrian explosion of animals is especially striking, it is far from the only “explosion” of new living forms.  The first winged insects, birds, flowering plants, mammals, and many other groups also appear abruptly in the fossil record, with no apparent connection to putative ancestors in the lower, older layers of fossil-bearing sedimentary rock."  Stephen Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis, 2021

“These first skeletal animals arrived not in just one or two phyla (basic body plans).  Fossils unearthed in southern China and in the Canadian Rockies reveal that 50-80 percent of the animal phyla known to exist at any time in Earth’s history appeared within no more than a few million years of one another, as the Cambrian geological period began, 542-543 million years ago…A team of geologists at Franklin and Marshall College showed that of the 182 animal skeletal designs theoretically permitted by the laws of physics, 146 appear in the Burgess Shale (Canadian Rockies) fossils.”  Hugh Ross, Improbable Planet, 2016

“..mutation and natural selection can account for “the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest.”  Stephen Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis, 2021

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This week we take one of the most difficult parts of our journey; the leap from lifelessness to life.  Could there really be that much luck in the universe or is this the hand of intelligence at work?

“Life is one of the strangest phenomena known.  In my opinion it shows that the universe is capable of almost anything.  Yet it amazes me that we know so much about how the universe began many billions of years ago, but we have yet to discover how life itself began.  The most likely explanation is probably that we are an accident.  Just by chance, some molecules bumped into each other at random, until finally one formed that could copy itself.  Then began the slow process of evolution that led to all the extraordinary diversity of life on earth.  Life seems to be simply what matter does given the right conditions and enough time.”  Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking: The Story of Everything, Discovery Channel

“Life cannot have had a random beginning … The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 10^40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.”   Fred Hoyle and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1981)

In my book Signature in the Cell, I perform updated calculations of the probability of the origin of even a single functional protein or corresponding functional gene (the section of a DNA molecule that directs the synthesis of a particular protein) by chance alone…I show that the probability of producing even a single functional protein of modest length (150 amino acids) by chance alone in a prebiotic environment stands at no better than a “vanishingly small” 1 chance in 10^164, and inconceivably small probability.  Return of the God Hypothesis, Stephen Meyer, 2021  Page 175

“…Tompa and Rose have demonstrated mathematically that even having all the requisite parts for a cell will not ensure that those ingredients will self-organize into a living system.  Instead, the cell, like the individual genes or proteins, faces an extreme combinational problem.  Tompa and Rose calculate, building on the work of protein scientist Cyrus Levinthal, that there are a whopping 10^79,000,000,000 different ways of combining just the proteins in a relatively simple unicellular yeast.  That number only grows exponentially larger when biologists attempt to calculate the number of possible ways of combining all the proteins and all the other large molecular components necessary for that one-celled organism, including DNA and RNA molecules, ribosomes, lipids and glycolipid molecules, and others.”  Return of the God Hypothesis, Stephen Meyer, 2021  Page 291

“Nevertheless, it may be that the origin of life is not the only major gap in the evolutionary story that is bridged by sheer luck, anthropically justified.  For example, my colleague, Mark Ridley in Mendel’s Demon…has suggested that the origin of the eukaryotic cell (our kind of cell, with a nucleus and various other complicated features such as mitochondria, which are not present in bacteria) was an even more momentous, difficult and statistically improbable step than the origin of life.  The origin of consciousness might be another major gap whose bridging was of the same order of improbability.  One-off events like this might be explained by the anthropic principle, along the following lines.  There are billions of planets that have developed life at the level of bacteria…Natural selection works because it is a cumulative one-way street to improvement.  It needs some luck to get it started, and the ‘billions of planets’ anthropic principle grants it that

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So let’s talk about what is next…

God loves you.  Enjoy and grow the relationship with your Heavenly Father.  You have been adopted into His family.  You are a child of the One True King!!  Welcome to the family!!!!!

You don't have to earn God's love.  He can't love you more than He already does and He will never love you less!

1.     Forgiven is forever – let’s talk about the finished work of Christ on the cross:

a.      Are we clean?

·        Acts 10:15, Acts 11:9, 1st John 1:7

b.      Are we spotless?

·        Eph. 5:27, Heb 9:13-15, Heb 9:24-28, 1st Peter 1:22-23

c.      Are we redeemed?

·        Eph 1:7, Eph 4:30, Romans 3:23-24

d.      Are we justified?

·        Romans 3:23-24, Romans 4:1-5, Romans 5:1-2

e.      Are we reconciled?

·        Romans 5:9-10

f.       Are we saved?

·        Romans 1:16-17, Romans 6:14, Romans 10:9-11

2.     Get a good Bible – you want a literal translation, not someone else’s opinion and then get a good study guide to dig deeper

a.     New King James Version

b.     Christian Standard Bible (CSB)

c.      English Standard Version (ESV)

3.     Get into your Bible.  This is one of the most important parts.  Start with Matthew and move forward into the New Testament.  Romans is an amazing walk through of Christian theology.  Ephesians is my favorite book in the entire Bible (God’s plan and God’s love).  DON’T listen to what the internet says about God’s word.  Get into God’s word yourself.

4.     Then get a good Study Guide to let a study guide help answer questions with the guidance of someone with a bit more background.  There are two types: verse by verse and major topics.  Both have their benefits.  Verse by verse is a great companion as you read through the Bible, while it really helps to cover major topics that may appear over larger sections of the Bible (topics like eternal security or the Trinity).  I would recommend the following: 

a.     Vernon McGee’s Through the Bible is a seven book set that goes verse by verse through the entire Old and New Testaments.  It is Old King James translation, but Dr. McGee does a great job walking through what various scriptures mean.  

b.     Grounded in Truth by Adrian Rodgers two book series is a great discipleship tool that looks at important topics rather than individual verses.

c.      Journey Discipleship by John Honeycutt is also a great discipleship tool that looks at important topics rather than individual verses.

5.     Find a good church – what to look for

a.     Christian church

b.     Do they use a standard Bible translation, or something really out there?  God’s word is not negotiable

1.     It’s okay if the Bible challenges you sometimes

c.      Look for God’s peace

6.     The tomb is forever empty – Jesus is on the throne!!  Rejoice in the hope that is yours!!

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This week we celebrate the resurrection!!  This week we look at proof of the resurrection, the ultimate proof of how much God loves you!!!

1st Cor 15, “Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand, 2 by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. 3 For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that He was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve. 6 After that He was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep. 7 After that He was seen by James, then by all the apostles. 8 Then last of all He was seen by me also, as by one born out of due time.” NKJV - 1982 Thomas Nelson

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How much does God love you?  This week we talk about God’ plan to bring us back to Him.  Spoiler Alert: He loves you so much He gave everything for you!!

“I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sado-masochistic and repellent.  We should also dismiss it as barking mad, but for its ubiquitous familiarity which has dulled our objectivity.  If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, without having himself tortured and executed in payment…”  The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, 2006, pg 287

Eph 1, “3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, 4 just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, 5 having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, 6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved. 7 In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace 8 which He made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence, 9 having made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Himself, 10 that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth—in Him. 11 In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will, 12 that we who first trusted in Christ should be to the praise of His glory.”  NKJV - 1982 Thomas Nelson

“But supposing God became a man – suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God’s nature in one person – then that person could help us.  He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God.  You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man.”  Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis, 1953 - Pg 58

“There is such a thing as the momentary power to remember that we forget.  And the most ignorant of humanity know by the very look of earth that they have forgotten heaven.”  G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 1925 Page 85

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This week getting ready for Easter, we look at Pascal’s Wager and the growing weight of scientific evidence pointing to the existence of a Creator as the best explanation for how we got here.  Consider for a moment the possibility that you are the most valuable thing in the entire universe and God created all of this for you!

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This week we see the clear fingerprint of design when we look at the most complex programming ever discovered; you!  God loves us so much, he wrote the code!

“DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.”  Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, 1996, Boulder

“What is it about these two patterns that indicates the activity of an intelligence, whereas other patterns…do not?  The key concept is that of “independence”.  I define a specification as a match between an event and an independently given pattern.  Events that are both highly complex and specified (that is, that match an independently given pattern) indicate design.”  Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe – page 29 – William Dembski

“When Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, they made a shocking discovery.  DNA could store information in the form of a four-character digital code.  Their structural model of DNA showed that strings of precisely sequenced chemical subunits called “nucleotide bases” – affixed along the interior of the DNA double-helix backbone – could store and transmit information.”  The Return of the God Hypothesis, Stephen Meyer, Pg 165

“The [anthropic-design argument] and what it points to is of such an order of certainty that in any other sphere of science, it would be regarded as settled.  To insist otherwise is like insisting that Shakespeare was not written by Shakespeare because it might have been written by a billion monkeys sitting at a billion keyboards typing for a billion years.  So it might.  But the sight of scientific athesists clutching at such desperate straws has put new spring in the step of theists.”  Clifford Longley, Focusing pg 10

“The standard neo-Darwinian evolutionary mechanism comprises (1) natural selection and/or (2) genetic drift acting on (3) adaptively random genetic variations and mutations.  As conceived from Darwin to the present, natural selection “selects,” or acts to preserve, those random variations that confer a fitness or functional advantage upon the organisms that possess them.  But it “selects” only after such advantageous variations or mutations have arisen.  Thus, selection does not cause novel variations; rather it sifts what is delivered to it by the random changes (i.e. mutations) that do cause variations…All this means that natural selection does nothing to help generate functional DNA base (or amino-acid) sequences, that is, new genetic information.  It can only preserve such sequences (if they confer a functional advantage) once they have originated.”  Return of the God Hypothesis, Stephen Meyer, Page 323

“The origin of life was the chemical event, or series of events, whereby the vital conditions for natural selection first came about.  The major ingredient was heredity, either DNA or (more probably) something that copies like DNA but less accurately, perhaps the related molecule RNA.  Once the vital ingredient – some kind of genetic molecule – is in place, true Darwinian natural selection can follow, and complex life emerges as the eventual consequence.  But the spontaneous arising by chance of the first hereditary molecule strikes many as improbable.  Maybe it is – very very improbable…”  Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

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This week we see whether or not Richard Dawkins successfully makes the case in Climbing Mount Improbable for how complex biological life could have formed.  Spoiler alert…not really.  You are God’s greatest creation!!

“In Climbing Mount Improbable, I expressed the point in a parable.  One side of a mountain is a sheer cliff, impossible to climb, but on the other side is a gentile slope to the summit.  On the summit sits a complex device such as an eye or a bacterial flagellar motor.  The absurd notion that such complexity could spontaneously self-assemble is symbolized by leaping from the foot of the cliff to the top in one bound.  Evolution, by contrast, goes around the back of the mountain and creeps up the gentle slope to the summit: easy!” Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2006 pg 147

“Religion is so wasteful, so extravagant; and Darwinian selection habitually targets and eliminates waste.  Nature is a miserly accountant, grudging the pennies, watching the clock, punishing the smallest extravagance.” Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2006 pg 190

“On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed.  This preservation of favorable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest.” Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species, 1859, Page 77