This is my first foray into answering some questions based on Christian Apologetic. I posted a question out on Facebook page and had a number of people respond with questions and comments. Here in my Blog I will be answering each of those questions as I finish some research and get the time to create a post for them.
I invite those who have additional questions to please ask them of me - I am not a scholar, I do not have degree in Theology, and I didn't stay at a Holiday Inn last night. 😎 But I am a believer in Jesus as my Saviour, and I didn't come to that conclusion easily. I still have a lot of questions, and I continue to seek answers in my faith. So while I may not immediately have the answer about God, I am willing to do the research needed to find answers for us both.
Here is a screenshot from the Facebook post, talking with Michael A Ventrella, to set the scene so to speak, about the first question from that post.
Question:
OK, the biggest mystery to me is this: How do religious
people who believe in science and evidence and don't fall for believing in
supernatural things or astrology justify their belief in organized religion
with all its trappings?
In other words, I can understand people who say they believe
in god but not in angels and devils and all the magic in the Bible, but how can
you believe in those kinds of things and justify it intellectually?
Answer:
This is a good question. Most often it goes hand-in-hand
with questions like:
·
“Isn’t God just the same as believing in fairies,
dragons, and leprechauns?”
·
“Is faith in religion delusional?”
·
“You are a scientist! How can you possibly
believe in God if you have work in (insert area of study here)?” Those areas of
study can be biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, astrophysics,
archaeology, and many more.
Let’s start with a basic premise that if God is real, then
this is a God who made the universe, and a being with that immense amount of
power does have the power to perform miracles, walk on water,
raise people from the dead and other supernatural phenomena, and angels and
other spiritual beings then must be real too.
I would also like to add in an observation that people
(including myself here) need to look information with an open mind, instead of
with a pre-conceived end in mind. This is true for everyone, atheist,
creationist, and agnostic alike. Blaise Pascal is reportedly quoted as saying “People
almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the
basis of what they find attractive.” If what we are seeking is evidence for
or against there being a God, we need to pursue the goal of evidence first without
skewing it either way in advance.
In a forensic crime scene, investigators need to look at the
evidence and follow the trail – they cannot decide who the criminal is and then
make the evidence fit their case. Crime scene investigators take all the
evidence they can find and come to the most reasonable
conclusion. This is why court cases need to be proven “beyond a reasonable
doubt”. They are not looking for 100% - there is always room for doubt, but
they need to prove a case so that the most reasonable conclusion is what a jury
and judge find a verdict on. 1
Similarly, we need to look at the evidence for God and find
out if it is accurate or not. Can we make the case that the best explanation
for certain things is God, or some other cause?
Something that usually surprises a lot of people is that
famous historical scientists Galileo, Kepler, Pascal, Boyle, Newton, Faraday
and Clerk-Maxwell were all firm and convinced believers in God.2
Many scientists look at the complexity of the universe, the mathematical
improbability of life arising from nothing, and rationalize that there had to
be some form of Intelligence in order for there to be an Intelligent Design. The
complexity in life and its origin cannot be explained simply by natural causes
– greater and greater forms of complex life do not arise with gradual change.
The fossil record shows explosions of life very suddenly not slowly over great
periods of time, and it and all current life forms show reproduction after
their own kind rather than morphing into other species.
It has been stated by mathematicians that the probability of
the universe existing in the exact way it is now is an astronomically huge
number, so infinitesimal a chance that they can just call it impossible. There
are others who argue that with probability maths, the existence of anything can
be explained simply in a formula that accounts for incredibly small chances.
Regardless of which side of the fence you are on, there is still a question
that both have to answer: what started it all? What was the moment
before? If we assume that the Big Bang is an accurate depiction of the
beginning of the universe, then what about the moment before the bang? There
had to be something or someone to kick off the chain reaction to start it all.
Some try to get around this and state that if there are an
infinite number of universes, most of which don’t support life as we know it
but a few that do, we would eventually get around to having our universe just
the way it is. They claim this is a naturalist explanation for origins, but
this still doesn’t answer the question; ok, fine, there are infinite number of
universes, but there still needs to be that moment before the machine started
cranking out infinite universes…what caused it to start?
Even when atheistic scientists point to natural explanations
for the origin of the universe, they still need to explain it with something
supernatural in the end. For example, some scientists have admitted that the
development of life on Earth from random chemicals and such coming together at
the early stages of the planet’s creation is not possible, so they submit that the
seeds of life came from extra-terrestrial origin and had to have been dropped
here at some point (Panspermia Theory).3 The challenge with this
theory, assuming it was correct, is that it still doesn’t explain origin of
life, it just pushes the explanation back one more step – ok, if bacteria from
a comet fell to Earth, or intelligent aliens purposefully dropped seeds of life
here, where did that bacteria or the aliens come from? There still has to be
something that created them before they could be placed on Earth.
In this universe, we are limited to looking from the inside
out, but whatever created the universe has to have the capability of looking
from the outside in. There is no natural explanation for this yet – the most
reasonable explanation is some type of Intelligent power. We’re not saying the
God of the Bible yet, we’re just seeing that the evidence points more and more
to a Divine Intelligence, instead of random chance.
Stephen Hawking lectured on “The Beginning of Time”4. The summary of it is that
there was a beginning to the universe (the Big Bang) and it was the start of
energy, matter, space, and time. (Side note that there are other papers that have
possible theories to go against this, but they have not been proven out, and
have a number of their own flaws to contend with). The inclusion of time as having a beginning is
important. How do we get a beginning, a starting point to the universe, from within
the universe itself? As we mentioned above, something that exists within the
universe could not have created the universe – whatever function, being,
intelligence, machine, will, or process that started creation had to exist
previous to the universe so that it could create it. The Bible describes God as
existing outside of time, and because time has a beginning only a being that
existed before time started and also exists outside of matter, energy, and
space would be able to create it in the first place. This leaves God as the most
reasonable explanation.
There are many unexplained phenomena that happen today. Many
can be chalked up to luck, skill, coincidence, or sometimes aliens or
government conspiracy. Even with all of those explanations, there are some that
have no explanation at all. Are these miracles, or angels intervening on
someone’s behalf? I admit that there are a lot of logical explanations that are
possible, and I will still seek them out before blindly believing in something
supernatural from God – but I don’t discount the possibility of God acting in
some way. After all, if He really did create the universe, is it really so hard
to believe that He could also heal someone, or send an angel to help you in
some way?
Footnotes:
1 – A good person to listen to is J. Warner Wallace, a forensic
detective. A couple of good YouTube videos that will go into more detail of
studying a crime scene and using the same skills to investigate Biblical
accuracy are: https://youtu.be/DCHJbO-3-jA https://youtu.be/ayJOAOQJh7E
2 – Excerpt taken from the book Can Science Explain
Everything? by John C Lennox, a joint venture with the Oxford Centre for
Christian Apologetics, Zacharias Institute, and The Good Book Company.
3 – Panspermia Theory from multiple sources and discussions,
however a good summary can be found on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
4 – Lecture given by Professor S.W.Hawking, which can be
found at http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html
