Hoo boy! That did it! LOL. Okay, here's my little contribution...
Far from being a blind faith, Christianity can be logically
defended.
In our everyday experience, just about everything seems to have a
beginning. In fact, the laws of science show that even things
which look the same through our lifetime, like the sun and other
stars, are running down. The sun is using up its fuel at millions
of tonnes each second. since, therefore, it cannot last forever,
it had to have a beginning. The same can be shown to be true for
the entire universe.
So when Christians claim that the God of the Bible created the
entire universe, some will ask what seems a logical question,
namely Where did God come from?
The Bible makes it clear in many places that God is outside of
time. He is eternal, with no beginning or end - He is infinite!
He also knows all things, being infinitely intelligent.
1 Is this logical? Can modern science allow for such a notion?
how could you recognize the evidence for an intelligent Creator?
Recognizing intelligence
For more information, visit Q&A: God Scientists get excited about
finding stone tools in a cave because these
speak of intelligence - a tool maker. They could not have
designed themselves. Neither would anyone believe that the carved
Presidents' heads on Mt Rushmore were the product of millions of
years of chance erosion. We can recognize design - the evidence
of the outworkings of intelligence - in the man-made objects all
around us.
Similarly, in William Paley's famous argument, a watch implies a
watchmaker.
2 Today, however, a large proportion of people, including many
leading scientists, believe that all plants and animals,
including the incredibly complex brains of the people who make
watches, motor cars, etc., were not designed by an intelligent
God but rather came from an unintelligent evolutionary process.
But is this a defensible position?
Design in living things
Molecular biologist Dr Michael Denton, writing as an agnostic,
concluded:
Alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the
molecular machinery of life, even our most advanced [twentieth
century technology appears] clumsy. It would be an illusion to
think that what we are aware of at present is any more than a
fraction of the full extent of biological design. In practically
every field of fundamental biological research ever-increasing
levels of design and complexity are being revealed at an
ever-accelerating rate.
3 The world-renowned crusader for Darwinism and atheism, Prof.
Richard Dawkins, states:
We have seen that living things are too improbable and too
beautifully designed to have come into existence by chance.
4 Thus, even the most ardent atheist concedes that design is all
around us. To a Christian, the design we see all around us is
totally consistent with the Bible's explanation that God created
all.
However, evolutionists like Dawkins reject the idea of a
Designer. He comments (emphasis added):
All appearance to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is
the blind forces of physics, *albeit deployed in a very special
way.* A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and
springs, and plans their interconnections, with future purpose in
his mind's eye. [Is this not what we SEE?]
Natural selection, the blind, unconscious,
automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know
is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful
form of all life, has no purpose in.
[Seems like a non sequitur to me...]
It has no mind. It does not
plan for the future - it is the blind watchmaker.
[Two words: Bird wings.]
5 Selection and design
Life is built on information, contained in that molecule of
heredity, DNA. Dawkins believes that natural selection6 and
mutations (blind, purposeless copying mistakes in this DNA)
together provide the mechanism for producing the vast amounts
of information responsible for the design in living things.7
[One might as well expect a Sonata to emerge from radio static.]
Natural selection is a logical process that can be observed.
However, selection can only operate on the information already
contained in genes - it does not produce new information.8
Actually, this is consistent with the Bible's account of
origins; God created distinct kinds of animals
and plants, each to reproduce after its own kind.
One can observe great variation in a kind, and see the results of
natural selection. For instance, dingoes, wolves, and coyotes
have developed over time as a result of natural selection
operating on the information in the genes of the wolf/dog kind.
But no new information was produced - these varieties have
resulted from rearrangement, and sorting out, of the information
in the original dog kind. One kind has never been observed to
change into a totally different kind with new information that
previously did not exist!
Without a way to increase information, natural selection will not
work as a mechanism for evolution. Evolutionists agree with this,
but they believe that mutations somehow provide the new
information for natural selection to act upon.
Can mutations produce new information?
Actually, it is now clear that the answer is no! Dr Lee Spetner,
a highly qualified scientist who taught information and
communication theory at Johns Hopkins University, makes this
abundantly clear in his recent book:
In this chapter I'll bring several examples of evolution, [i.e.,
instances alleged to be examples of evolution] particularly
mutations, and show that information is not increased. But in
all the reading I've done in the life-sciences literature,
I've never found a mutation that added information.9
All point mutations that have been studied on the molecular level
turn out to reduce the genetic information and not to increase
it.10
The NDT [neo-Darwinian theory] is supposed to explain how the
information of life has been built up by evolution. The essential
biological difference between a human and a bacterium is in the
information they contain. All other biological differences follow
from that. The human genome has much more information than does
the bacterial genome.
Information cannot be built up by mutations that lose it. A
business can't make money by losing it a little at a time.11
Evolutionary scientists have no way around the conclusions that
many scientists, including Dr Spetner, have come to. Mutations
do not work as a mechanism to fuel the evolutionary process.
More problems!
Scientists have found that within the cell, there are thousands
of what can be called biochemical machines. All of their parts
have to be in place simultaneously or the cell can't function.
Things which were thought to be simple mechanisms, such as being
able to sense light and turn it into electrical impulses, are in
fact highly complicated.
Since life is built on these 'machines', the idea that natural
processes could have made a living system is untenable.
Biochemist Dr Michael Behe (see The mousetrap man) uses the term
'irreducible complexity' in describing such biochemical
'machines'.
systems of horrendous, irreducible complexity inhabit the cell.
The resulting realization that life was designed by an
intelligence is a shock to us in the twentieth century who have
gotten used to thinking of life as the result of simple natural
laws. But other centuries have had their shocks, and there is no
reason to suppose that we should escape them.12
Richard Dawkins recognizes this problem of needing 'machinery'
to start with when he states:
"The theory of the blind watchmaker is extremely powerful given
that we are allowed to assume replication and hence cumulative
selection. But if replication needs complex machinery, since the
only way we know for complex machinery ultimately to come into
existence is cumulative selection, we have a problem." 13
A problem indeed! The more we look into the workings of life,
the more complicated it gets, and the more we see that life could
not arise by itself. Not only is a source of information needed,
but the complex 'machines' of the chemistry of life need to be
in existence right from the start!
A greater problem still!
Some still try to insist that the machinery of the first cell
could have arisen by pure chance. For instance, they say, by
randomly drawing alphabet letters in sequence from a hat,
sometimes you will get a simple word like "BAT".14 So given long
time periods, why couldn't even more
complex information arise by chance?
However, what would the word "BAT" mean to a German or Chinese
speaker? The point is that an order of letters is meaningless
unless there is a language convention and a translation system
in place which makes it meaningful!
In a cell, there is such a system (other molecules) that makes
the order on the DNA meaningful. DNA without the
language/translation system is meaningless, and these systems
without the DNA wouldn't work either.
The other complication is that the translation machinery which
reads the order of the 'letters' in the DNA is itself specified
by the DNA! This is another one of those 'machines' that needs
to be fully-formed or life won't work.
Can information arise from non-information?
Dr Werner Gitt, Director and Professor at the German Federal
Institute of Physics and Technology, makes it clear that one of
the things we know absolutely for sure from science, is that
information cannot arise from
disorder by chance. It always takes (greater) information to
produce information, and ultimately information is the result
of intelligence:
A code system is always the result of a mental process (it
requires an intelligent origin or inventor). It should be
emphasized that matter as such is unable to generate any code.
All experiences indicate that a thinking being voluntarily
exercising his own free will, cognition, and
creativity, is required.15
There is no known natural law through which matter can give rise
to information, neither is any physical process or material
phenomenon known that can do this.16
What is the source of the information?
We can therefore deduce that the huge amount of information in
living things must originally have come from an intelligence,
which had to have been far superior to ours, as scientists are
revealing every day. But then, some will say that such a source
would have to be caused by something with even greater
information/intelligence.
However, if they reason like this, one could ask where this
greater information/intelligence came from? And then where
did that one come from. One could extrapolate to infinity, for
ever, unless...
Unless there was a source of infinite intelligence, beyond our
finite understanding. But isn't this what the Bible indicates
when we read, In the beginning God...? The God of the Bible is
an infinite being not bound by limitations of time, space,
knowledge, or anything else.
So which is the logically defensible position? - that matter
eternally existed (or came into existence by itself for no
reason), and then by itself arranged itself into information
systems against everything observed in real science? Or that
a being with infinite intelligence,17 created information
systems for life to exist, agreeing with real science?
The answer seems obvious, so why don't all intelligent
scientists accept this? Michael Behe answers:
Many people, including many important and well-respected
scientists, just don't want there to be anything beyond nature.
They don't want a supernatural being to affect nature, no
matter how brief or constructive the interaction may have
been. In other words, - they bring an a priori philosophical
commitment to their science that restricts what kinds of
explanations they will accept about the physical world.
Sometimes this leads to rather odd behavior.18
The crux of the matter is this: If one accepts there is a God
who created us, then that God also owns us. He thus has a
right to set the rules by which we must live. In the Bible, He
has revealed to us that we are in rebellion against our Creator.
Because of this rebellion called sin, our physical bodies are
sentenced to death, but we will live on, either with
God, or without Him in a place of judgment.
But the good news is that our Creator provided, through
the cross of Jesus Christ, a means of deliverance for our
sin of rebellion, so that those who come to Him in faith, in
repentance for their sin, can receive the forgiveness of a
Holy God and spend forever with their Lord.
So who created God?
By definition, an infinite, eternal being has always existed
- no one created God. He is the self-existing one, the great
"I am" of the Bible.19
He is outside of time - in fact, He created time.
You might say, "But that means I have to accept this by faith,
as I can't understand it."
We read in the book of Hebrews, But without faith it is
impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must
believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that
diligently seek him (Hebrews 11:6).
But this is not blind faith, as some think. In fact, the
evolutionists who deny God have a blind faith - they have to
believe something that is against real science, namely, that
information can arise from disorder by chance.
The Christian faith is not a blind faith, it is a logically
defensible faith. This is why the Bible makes it clear that
anyone who does not believe in God is without excuse:
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world
are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are ade,
even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without
excuse. (Romans 1:20).