Is Anybody Out There?

In 1970 Pink Floyd released a song with only four words. They repeated the four words four times.   It's hard to believe you can write a song that has only four words but I think these words, in the form of a question, resonate with me and the only thing that might make the song more complete is an answer to the question:




Is anybody out there?


Is anybody out there?


Is anybody out there?


Is anybody out there?


I originally had a different path for this blog in relation to these four words, which I'll share at the end, but I think God is leading be down a different road.  


You may remember that a week ago I had a faith testing experience with a Monarch butterfly but that experience (which you can read at your leisure) revealed something else to me.  I have a number of people close to me, people I care about, who deny the existence of a creator God.  They have answered the question "Is anybody out there?" with a resounding "No!"  No God is out there.  I have written a couple blogs posts pondering the evolution-creation debate but as I thought about the butterfly I remembered its AMAZING life cycle.  


Please read this carefully and let it sink in.


In March and April  Monarchs lay an egg the size of a pinhead.  The egg sits on the leaf of a milkweed plant and four days later it hatches into a tiny caterpillar which eats and grows for two weeks.  It attaches itself to the leaf with silk and it's skin peels off as it is transformed into a chrysalis (like the cocoon of a moth).  Over the course of 10 days a mysterious process we call metamorphosis (change of form) takes place and out comes a beautiful and graceful adult monarch butterfly.  That in itself is amazing but read on!


This butterfly will lay similar eggs just before it dies only 2-6 weeks after being born.  The first butterfly is generation number one and the eggs just laid will be generation two. The second generation of monarch butterflies is born in May and June, and then the third generation will be born in July and August. These monarch butterflies will go through exactly the same four stage life cycle as the first and second generations did, dying two to six weeks after it becomes a beautiful monarch butterfly, laying eggs for the fourth generation butterflies.  Still with me?


Here is where it gets really crazy.  This fourth generation Monarch, born around September doesn't die in a few weeks but instead takes flight, heading to the warm weather of the south.  It flies 2500 miles to Mexico or California and will live 6-8 months before migrating 2500 miles back up north where it will lay eggs in March and April for the first generation of new Monarchs.  


"Is anybody out there?"  Hmmm?  I think that as I have shed my Godless view of evolution from the primordial soup of the cooling earth, the Monarch stands as a monument to the creativity of God.  If you doubt that God exists or that there is a designer of life please think hard about the Monarch and how it could have come to pass by slow steady changes over time.  I think you will have to cling to your atheism only with the strength of your pride.  I had the gift of having my pride stripped from me so that my eyes could see clearly the hand of God.  It is easier to lay it down rather than having it stripped but whatever works!


Lastly, I was going to use the words, "Is anybody out there?" as a reaction to the lack of response to my last post asking for questions or comments but God let me know today that it is His business who reads this blog, not mine.  Whether 0 or 1,000,000 it matters not.... I just need to keep writing.  God will take it from there.  My pride got in the way.  So that's why this is out on Monday and not Saturday.  I was pouting.......  :)

John 1:2-4 

He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men.

Here is a link to a time lapse video of a Monarch life cycle.. facts above where from monarch-butterfly.com


Monarch Butterfly


Peace in Christ,


David

Did Science Kill God?

"In the beginning God Created . . . "

Then came Charles Darwin who, in 1859, published his book "On the Origin of Species". In it he proposed his theory of evolution based on survival of the fittest and natural selection. Organisms evolve by undergoing spontaneous mutations, a very small number of which may be beneficial to their survival. Because those lucky few organisms now have a selective advantage, they pass on their genes while the others die off and the species then "evolves". Cool! Woolly mammoths become less woolly as "global warming" causes the ice age to end and wallah, we have the circus elephant. Animals can adapt to their environment as it changes but supposedly thay can even change from one species to the next. Darwin didn't know how life began in the first place and expected future investigation to find a plethora of examples of transitional species in the fossil record (Like an elephant with the tail of a whale or a lizard with little wing buds). Neither has been found.

Regardless, a few years later, Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher declared, "God is dead."

Well? Is he? Is God effectively "dead" because science and philosophy have made him obsolete? Is it possible for any rational human being in 2009 to believe in an all knowing, all powerful, creator God? Is faith in God more of a leap than faith in the spontaneous, random development of "life" and its subsequent evolution to its present state? I'd like you to be open to the truth regardless of where it leads. If God didn't create (or design) and we are truly random molecules that have gotten significantly more organized by time and chance then it changes everything. If those that have used Darwin's theory to kill God are right then we are no more valuable, no more important, and no more significant that an ice cube. If God did create and the Bible is true then we are accountable (but loved) by him and the world better look up.

Like I said in my previous post, I am a scientist. There was a time when I believed that life began in the "primordial soup" of the cooling earth and a few chemicals gathered into a little genetic material which began to self replicate and then a little bacteria popped out. A billion or more years later humans are flying to the moon and have developed weapons that could destroy the earth from which we evolved. I lived like I wanted to live and God couldn't tell me what to do or how to live because he either didn't exist or at a minimum wasn't really involved. I wasn't accountable to anyone greater than myself. I certainly didn't take a critical look at what I was being told by science but what is WAY more important is that I didn't take a critical look at myself. It was much safer for me to be content being a more evolved monkey in a society of evolved monkeys. I was thus a product of my instincts and environment. If I did wrong, it wasn't really my fault. It was instinct. We are survivors and my goal was to be one of the fittest then pass on my highly advanced genes to the next generation. Actually, if we are just chemicals without a creator then there really is no absolute right or wrong anyway. We can decide for ourselves what is "good" and what is "bad". Sorry, this is a topic for another day. Back to creation.

Do I, as a Christian, need to open my skull and drop my brain into a large box outside the church as I walk in on Sunday or can I reconcile my biblical worldview with the scientific evidence. I think I can do the later and I am not alone.

Doctor Ben Carson is one of the world's best pediatric neurosurgeons. He graduated from Yale and then the University of Michigan Medical School. He gained national attention for leading the team that separated conjoined twins that were joined at the back of the head. He has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and is now the director of pediatric neurosurgery are Johns Hopkins University. Ben Carson believes in the creation story.

In the 1970's Dr. Francis Collins was a scientist and an atheist. In medical school he was faced with life and death every day and a patient once asked him, "What do you believe doctor?". He began to search for answers. He said, "I had to admit that the science I loved so much was powerless to answer questions such as 'What is the meaning of life?' 'Why am I here?' 'Why does mathematics work, anyway?' 'If the universe had a beginning, who created it?' 'Why are the physical constants in the universe so finely tuned to allow the possibility of complex life forms?' 'Why do humans have a moral sense?' 'What happens after we die?' (Watch Francis Collins discuss how he came to believe in God ). Francis Collins is now the director of the Human Genome Project whose task has been to map out the 3.1 billion letter code of the human DNA code. Francis Collins believes in a creator God.

Look, I have come to the place where I realize that I can't convince you of the existence of God by intellectual might. I can't wrestle you to the ground with my copy of Genesis. That is not my intent today. But, I do realize one thing that the bible tells me to be true, "The Gospel is foolishness to those who are perishing." It was foolishness to me when I was drowning in my own sin. But I also know that the Holy Spirit of God can make the most ardent atheist the most faithful believer. My intent is to give you a moment of pause. To ask you to stop for a second and think. To look at life around you and inside of you. To set aside what you'd like to be true or what you believe to be true and say, "I want to know what IS true." If you need to follow the scientific evidence then by all means do so but do it to its logical end. Chicago tribune journalist Lee Strobel did that in an attempt to disprove the Bible and the historical Jesus and he is now Christian and an passionate sharer of the Gospel. Be careful because you may end up the same. If you already are a believer I pray that your faith was nudged just a bit higher today. I don't have the space here to put forth an argument against Evolution and for Creation or "Intelligent Design" but PLEASE feel free to ask me in the comments section of this post and I will give you plenty to keep you busy.

One last quote, from Werner Heisenberg (a Nobel Laureate in Physics for the creation of quantum mechanics):

"The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you."

Drink up!

Peace,

David

Examine the Evidence - What do you have to lose?

"Daw-gone-it, who took my cell phone charger?!! I always put it by the phone in the kitchen."

"I don't know honey. I haven't seen it", my wife says with a slight roll of her eyes.

"Well, I wish people wouldn't touch things that don't belong to them!"

I then spend an hour interrogating my wife and children as to the whereabouts of my cell phone charger because I believed with all of my heart that I left it in its usual spot. Frustrated, I gave up prideful and angry. A couple days later I was in the basement and my eye caught site of a black cord leading up to the top of the bistro table. Oh yeah (blushing) I plugged it in there when Ivor and I met last week. My bad. Pride, the mother of all sins!

I know that many of you who are reading today are believers but I also know that many are not. I'm going to ask those of you who are skeptical regarding the existence of God, the inspiration of the Bible, the resurrection of Jesus, and many other Christian beliefs to set aside your pride for a moment and open yourselves to the slim possibility that you might be wrong, that maybe you didn't actually leave the cell phone charger in the kitchen like you thought you did. What do you have to lose? Jesus said, "Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it." Luke 17:33 Could it be possible that giving up isn't really giving up at all? Hmmmm?

I'm a scientist. I have a Bachelors of Science degree in biology with a chemistry minor, I have two doctoral degrees and a partridge in a pear tree. Sorry, that last part just came out so easily I didn't have the heart to delete it. So how in the world could a guy like me believe in an eternal God, in the Genesis creation story, in Jonah being swallowed by a big fish, in the virgin birth of Jesus, and in the resurrection? The honest answer is that I came in the back door. God humbled me, allowed me to be broken, and then when I had nowhere else to go he opened my eyes and I experienced him. OK, that doesn't settle well with many of you but the next part might. When I came to believe I then had to reconcile what I knew to be true in my heart with what I thought to be true in my head. I had to examine the evidence!

I'm going to ask you to do the same. If you don't believe, are you doing so because of a lack of evidence or because you have never really examined the evidence? Have you really looked critically at the possibility of "life" coming from non-living chemicals, the spontaneous, random formation of the genetic code and it's ability to reproduce itself (had to from the beginning or it never would have gone past day one). Have you looked at the complexity of the human eye (not just the one but the two in perfect position and function to allow for depth perception). Have you seen the birth of a baby, a butterfly emerge from a cocoon, a queen bee guarded by drones, or the structure of lamanin (the stuff that holds us together)? Have you examined the sixty-six books of the Bible written by more than forty men over the period of nearly 1600 years or just written it off as rubbish? Have you looked at the life of Jesus and the lives of his followers both before Jesus' death and after? Here is a little appetizer: All of the Apostles except John were martyred for preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ and his resurrection. After Jesus' crucifixion they were hiding from the authorities but the day after they saw him ascend to heaven they hit the streets without fear. Would they have willingly given their lives (Peter crucified upside down) if they knew that what they were sharing was a lie? Doubtful.

Are you ready for the challenge? It's risky because if, in the end, you come to believe then you suddenly become accountable to the God who made you. If, in the end, you are right in your doubts then your life is random, you have no more value than a flea or an lump of coal, and death is the final word.

Here is the challenge:

1) Even if you aren't sure God exists, ask him in the quiet of your own mind to reveal himself to you and to open your spiritual eyes. You have to want to know truth or it will just be words. I know it might seem futile but give it a whirl.

2) Follow me over then next two weeks as I look at the Bible and it's accuracy, fulfilled prophecy, and power to change lives. I will also shed some light on the religion of Evolution which requires more faith than the religion of God.

3) Take a real hard look at life (yours and all of the life around you) and reevaluate your world view. Let the chips fall where they may. Science is following the evidence to its logical end.

I can tell you that my pride, my desire to be my own god, my desire not to be held accountable for my sins, and my desire to pursue pleasure was the stone wall that stood between me and my eventual faith in God. It wasn't really my science but my heart.

Over the next couple weeks I will introduce you to neurosurgeons, astrophysicists, and other learned people who realized that the more they came to see the remarkable complexity of life and of the universe the more they believed in the One who created it.

For those of you who are already believers I hope that this will further strengthen your faith as well as help you in your commission to make disciples. The Bible says in 1 Peter 3:15 "But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect."

You've also probably noticed that this site has undergone some recent changes. We hope you like the new look. If you get this blog via email subscription take a second and visit the blog page. We also have two audio podcasts on our main site "i61project.org". Come and visit. The podcasts as well as some of Ivor's music is available in the "media" section.

Peace,

David