Mulled Vine

“It just happened!” I cried, tears of frustration welling up inside me.
She looked at me with longsuffering bemusement. “You mean to say that heap of dirty clothing at the bottom of your cupboard just appeared, from nowhere?”
I nodded vigorously.
“Nothing to do with you?” she continued, peering intently into my eyes.
I met her gaze unflinchingly. “Nope.”
“Are you sure you are telling me the truth, Robbie?” I could hear the growing sternness in her voice but nodded again.
She sighed and took my hand gently, leading me to the window from which could see across the valley to the blue mountains shimmering in the distance.
“Those mountains,” she said, pointing. “How do you think they came about?”
I looked at her earnestly, years of Sunday School training clamouring for attention, and replied, “By accident.”
She looked at me aghast, but then regained her composure. “That’s just silly and you know it. Now tidy up those clothes and stop talking nonsense! I’ll wash your mouth out with soap if you lie to me again.”
“But, Mum!” I protested.
“Now!”

Click on the dots to try and encircle the cat. Click RESET to start.

WARNING – this is lots of fun and could consume important time that could be spent getting older.

Nice.

What a terrible word. It means everything without really meaning anything. Nice is insipid, devoid of content or contribution, weak, a waste of space.

We need glorious, feisty, delicious, devouring, passionate, strong adjectives that delight the mind and heart, not lukewarm, irrelevant, nice.

I am sometimes described as nice…

… and it infuriates me beyond reason.

I am a quiet, gentle sort, with moments of fire and passion when required, but nice I am not. I am not a doormat. I am not an irrelevance. I will not be ignored. I will be heard.

I don’t reckon Jesus was nice either. He was a man full of feelings, strength, devotion, duty, wisdom, a man after God’s own heart, a man after my own heart. He was no doormat. He would not be silenced.

So don’t call me nice.

Don’t call Him nice either.

We ain’t so.

The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist threats and have raised their security level from “Miffed” to “Peeved.” Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to “Irritated” or even “A Bit Cross.” Londoners have not been “A Bit Cross” since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies all but ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorised from “Tiresome” to a “Bloody Nuisance.” The last time the British issued a “Bloody Nuisance” warning level was during the great fire of 1666.

Also, the French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from “Run” to “Hide.” The only two higher levels in France are “Surrender” and “Collaborate.” The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France’s white flag factory, effectively paralysing the country’s military capability.

It’s not only the English and French that are on a heightened level of alert.

Italy has increased the alert level from “Shout Loudly and Excitedly” to “Elaborate Military Posturing.” Two more levels remain: “Ineffective Combat Operations” and “Change Sides.”

The Germans also increased their alert state from “Disdainful Arrogance” to “Dress in Uniform and Sing Marching Songs.” They also have two higher levels: “Invade a Neighbour” and “Lose.”

Belgians, on the other hand, are all on holiday as usual, and the only threat they are worried about is NATO pulling out of Brussels.

The Spanish are all excited to see their new submarines ready to deploy. These beautifully designed subs have glass bottoms so the new Spanish navy can get a really good look at the old Spanish navy.

I have never been comfortable with the intelligent designer argument for God, that is, something that appears to be designed must have a designer.

For example, take a rock painting.

I look at the painting, I think “painter”, but when I look at the rock, I think “rock”.

Yet this is one of THE arguments for believing in God, to the extent that its supposed to be undeniable.

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20)

Then in my reading this morning I found this:

“Did you see the movie Contact?”

“Sure,” I said. “It was based on Carl Sagan’s book.”

“That’s right” he replied. “In the movie, scientists are scanning the skies for signs of intelligent life in space.

Their radiotelescopes just receive static – random sounds from space. It’s reasonable to assume there’s no intelligence behind that. Then one day they begin receiving a transmission of prime numbers, which are numbers divisible only by themselves and one. The scientists reason that it’s too improbable that there would be a natural cause behind a string of numbers like that. This wasn’t merely unorganized static; it was information, a message with content. From that, they concluded there was an intelligent cause behind it.

As Sagan once himself said, ‘The receipt of a single message from space would be enough to know there’s an intelligence out there.’ That’s reasoning by analogy – we know that where there’s intelligent communication, there’s an intelligent cause.”
…
“And if a single message from space is enough for us to conclude there’s an intelligence behind it, then what about the vast amounts of information contained in the DNA of every living plant and animal?”
…
“Each cell in the human body contains more information than in all thirty volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It’s certainly reasonable to make the inference that this isn’t the random product of misguided nature, but it’s the unmistakable sign of an Intelligent Designer.”

and

More than thirty years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principle theories and experiments in the field end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance. (Klause Dose, “The Origin of Life: More Questions than Answers,” Interdisciplinary Science Review 13 (1998), 348.)

So I think its safe to say that I have been an idiot.

As this article was for a church newsletter, the answer to this question will be a rather unsurprising “Yes”. For unbelievers however, the issue is perhaps less clear.

1 Peter 1:15 states, ”… 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.” So how do we make a case for God’s existence?

The first and most obvious approach is our personal testimony. The reasons we first believed are bound to be convincing to others too, as will be the story of our changed lives; but personal testimony is subjective, and there will be some out there who will want more objective reasons to believe.

Apologetics is the branch of theology devoted to trying to answer such questions in an objective manner, and its goal is nicely summed up by 2 Corinthians 10:5: “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”

In this article I would like to briefly introduce you to a few of the arguments for the existence of God that have been produced by Christian apologists, in the hope that these will interest you, build your faith, and enable you to more ably “give the reason for the hope you have”, always remembering to do this with “gentleness and respect.”

The Cosmological argument contends that things do not come into existence by themselves, but are caused to come into being, and that since everything has a cause it follows that all causes trace ultimately back to a first uncaused cause, i.e. God. God does not require a cause because He is eternal and outside the “closed” system of time and space.

Counter arguments that the universe existed forever and hence doesn’t need a prime cause, or that the prime cause does not need to be God, don’t really hold water:

• We know that in this universe things just don’t exist forever. Everything around us ages; even things like the stars have a finite life. This tendency towards decay and disorder is what scientists call the 2nd law of thermodynamics. So if the universe did exist forever, everything would have died out by now, which is obviously not the case.
• If not God, what caused the universe to come into being? Sceptic scientists generally agree that there was a start to our universe (the “big bang”) but disagree on what happened before that, proposing various ideas such an infinitely expanding and contracting universe, or mysterious sub-atomic particles that just pop out of nothing. It gets very “creative” at this point, and there is no way to disprove such theories, but at the very least we’re on even footing when we assert that the creative cause was God.

The Teleological argument is the argument from design. In other words, when one sees a watch, one doesn’t think that it came about by means of a series of random accidents, but by design, and thus requires a designer. The same is true of the universe we live in, and the designer is God. Psalm 19:1 “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”

It is very clear that the universe is full of amazing order and balance. For example, astronomy is discovering evidence of a very finely balanced universe with a number of parameters such as the speed of light, gravitational force, the earth’s distance from the sun, strength of the magnetic field, and so on, that cannot vary much from their current values without exterminating life as we know it.

The existence of order is not generally questioned, so the debate revolves around what is the most reasonable explanation for this order. There are a number of options, ranging from intelligent design (Theism) through to naturalistic evolution (Atheism).

Many Christians avoid this debate by choosing a middle ground, taking a less literal view of Genesis, believing that God may have used natural processes such as evolution to create the universe over a long time span, perhaps by finely tuning the universe’s initial conditions or controlling the process in some way. This is known as theistic evolution.

But for those wishing to follow the Teleological argument to its logical conclusion the task is to show that naturalistic evolution is inadequate as an explanation for all the apparent order. There are several ways to do this, including:

• Point out that evolution is a theory not a fact. Science deals with the observable, quantifiable and repeatable, as it tries to discover the facts. Theories are proposed and remain theories until proven to be fact by experiment. Micro-evolutionary adaptation that has been observed within species has been extrapolated to a macro-evolutionary scale as an explanation for the origin of life, but there is no way to prove this as it deals with unrepeatable timescales.
• Point out that evolution is improbable. “If you took all the carbon in the universe and put it on the face of the earth, allowed it to chemically react at the most rapid rate possible, and left it for a billion years, the odds of creating just one functional protein molecule would be one chance in a 10 with 60 zeros after it. In other words, the odds for all practical purposes are zero.” (Walter L. Bradley, The Mystery of Life’s Origin). And that’s just one protein molecule – what about the odds for the rest of it?
• Point out that evolution is not without its weaknesses. For example, the mechanism of mutation combined with the law of survival of the fittest does not always seem to provide an adequate explanation for complex, apparently irreducible biological structures. Even Charles Darwin admitted: “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

So the choice is between an Intelligent Designer and an unproven (and arguably inadequate) Naturalistic Process to explain it all. Neither can be proven, so both require faith, but from the evidence which is more likely?

Ah, says the unbeliever, but if we had an infinite series of expanding and contracting different universes, then anything is possible and this is just the universe where the improbable happened.

As I said, both require faith.

In closing, Blaise Pascal, 17th century French mathematician, scientist, and religious philosopher, included the following Wager in his famous work Pensées:

“It is always a better bet to believe in God, because the expected value to be gained from believing in God is always greater than the expected value resulting from non-belief.”

So even if God’s existence cannot be proved it makes more sense to believe than to not believe because of the consequences. It is slightly ironic that in this case survival of the fittest means survival of those who believe in God.

Further Reading

Stand To Reason (www.str.org)
Tekton Apologetics Ministry (www.tektonics.org)
The Christian Think Tank (www.christian-thinktank.com)
Christian Answers Network (www.christiananswers.net)
Reasons To Believe (www.reasons.org)
Theistic Evolution (www.theistic-evolution.com)
Creation Science (www.icr.org