I'm done with my 'Surprise Me, God' experiment. I enjoyed trying something new. And it has helped me to see that I have to be more focused on the people around me, and to see what opportunities there are to enjoy and help them. But I've decided that my summer vacation is over – it's back to contending for the faith!
Which leads me to today's post, Darwinism's Fairytales. It seems incredible to me that perfectly intelligent people around us believe that life created itself – that the inanimate (i.e., non-living) became animate and living. More specifically, Darwinists believe that rock, water and lightning created a chain of events that led to Beethoven, Michelangelo, and Michael Phelps. Can random events and random forces really create something that is so obviously designed?
Of course not, and this is why I have entitled this post "Darwinism's Fairytales". Christians believe in the Resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ from the dead. We believe in the miracle of Jesus using 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish to feed 5,000 people (Mark 6:30). Yes, we believe in God controlling all of the natural forces on Earth, so that Jesus can calm a storm, and walk on water. Yes, these are amazing, miraculous events that the authors of the Bible understood were hard to believe. Yet they wrote them anyway, and after the Resurrection of Jesus the Messiah, Christianity still spread to consume the world, despite the persecution brought against it. How could so many people accept the fantastic stories of Jesus' life written by the eyewitnesses who studied under Him? The answer is because it is true.
Yet, many people in America today dismiss out of hand the miracles in the Bible, yet have faith in the story told in science classes throughout the country: that life formed through chance, and that that life grew more and more complex until people like Beethoven, Michelangelo and Michael Phelps walked the Earth. Why is this any easier to believe than the miracles reported in the Bible?
So let me start by describing a walk in the forest where we see two things around us on our walk (btw, our walk is on a great, beautiful, glorious day like it is today in Minnesota) – first we see a tree haven fallen in the forest, with burn marks around the jagged spot where the tree separated from its trunk. Then we walk by a stream where there are a great deal of sticks and chewed tree branches gathered together, mostly facing one way, and behind this pile of sticks the water is dammed up. We easily conclude one of these events was "designed" by something intelligent, while the other was the product of natural forces. Yes, the tree fallen in the forest appears to be caused by the natural forces of a lightning strike. While the sticks damming up the stream was the product of an intelligent force (a beaver) acting to create a beaver dam in the water. One was caused by natural forces, while the other was intelligently designed.
And so, can we use this example to see if life on Earth was designed? Let me use DNA as the starting point. Even the simplest living / reproducing cell has DNA. DNA is a large protein molecule. It contains the instructions for making the proteins, RNA and everything else in the cell. DNA has the instructions for the development of all life. DNA is complex, but is has something more than mere complexity - it has meaningful complexity. Similar to our understanding that a beaver dam is designed, while a fallen tree is not, isn't it obvious that DNA which has the instructions for the making of life itself is also designed? Why have we lost our way in America for understanding that life is the product of design?
Give me the miracles of the Bible anytime! It feels good to be back. I hope that you are able to enjoy these last few weeks of summer. May God bless you and your families this week.
2 comments:
All I can say is AMEN!
bry
Hello, and welcome back to the fray! Sorry I'm behind in getting to your posts, but i didn't realize the game was back on yet...
You belittle fairy tales, but then list several that you yourself cling to. You have called similar tales of miracles from other religions, "myths," then taken umbrage when I apply that term to Christianity. You take offense when I lump Christianity in with other religions, but refuse to see how it contains really cool bits and pieces from other religions, a practice of borrowing that continues to this day.
You say evolutionists believe in fairy tales, but then offer us a wizard little different than Merlin, Gandalf, or Dumbledore waving his hands and making something out of nothing... not even water, rocks, and lightning. By not taking a step back, you can't see how the stories and claims of Christianity follow some of the best and most classic storytelling patterns of history.
Then you labor all day in the fields to grow enough straw to fill your men, and make excuses when God does not make them stand up and walk.
You use the beaver as an example of a designer, and this is wisdom, because if we were designed, it was by Someone with no more design talent than a beaver. Yes, the beaver dam works, after a fashion, but it's not even St. Anthony Falls, let alone the Grand Coulee or Hoover.
If this world and its life was designed, then it was by a hesitant and shaky Hand. Several times has life been nearly wiped off this planet. Trial and Error seems to be the favoured design model. A God with so little confidence in Himself inspires little confidence or enthusiasm from me.
And it's not like some of His other creations have worked out so good either. The Seraphim, designed by God for the sole purpose of defending God, managed to instead produce Lucifer. Ooops. Maybe they (or at least one of them) got tired of circling God and telling him what a swell guy he was. After all, such a powerful God couldn't possibly be truly threatened by anything, thus negating their designed purpose. That God still has them uselessly flying around singing His praises instead of doing any real work, tells us that maybe God has some self-esteem issues.
All-in-all, God seems to be the ultimate Rube Goldberg designer. First it took him billions of years to cook the universal soup enough just to form the Earth. Then he had to fiddle with the Earth itself, including melting it back to slag once, before he got the recipe right to support his weird version of life. Then he came close to ruining the soup multiple times over a few billion more years. Then he designed MILLIONS of forms of life that were so flawed they couldn't survive for more than a few million years each. He couldn't even get us to walk upright until the tenth or eleventh try.
Today, we are still so full of flaws that we require very precise conditions just to survive. We have parts we don't need, can't use, and gum up the rest of the works when they go bad. We have parts that spin out of control or break well before their warranty date, and the answers we get to our Tech Support questions are murkier than Japanese stereo instructions, when we get an answer at all. If God was the CEO of Volvo, he'd be flipping burgers at Wendy's by now.
I believe MIT has issued several design papers that improve on most of God's major projects, and THEY have to obey the Laws of Physics!
So there. Guess I told you.
Hugs'n'kisses to kids and kittens!
~E~
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