Over the course of this discussion
there have been many times when I had to remind myself of how
clueless I must sound to those believing they are of the “rational
mind” variety. I have probably discussed religion more than I have
any real evidence of there being a creator, and I have done so only
because my own doubts (some of which are still there) spawned first
from my understanding of God through the person and life of Jesus.
Most people who are atheist or agnostic have already moved past these
questions, and I had hoped to at least invite them back into the
place where questioning is still relevant in the light of this
present age.
Earlier this week, we got to witness
two titans of opposing fields square off in a debate that seemed to
capture the attention of millions across the world. It was a
discussion about “Creationism” and if it has a place in the
scientific theorem of origins. Bill Nye, a science guy, and Ken Ham,
also a science guy and founder of the Creation Museum, had a
respectable exchange of words on the topic of evolution, young earth
science, and whether or not it was dangerous to believe things that
so obviously denied that which science has proven as factual. As I
mentioned earlier, I do not hold a particular stance on this issue,
but I do maintain a certain level of criticism in dealing with both
accounts. I see both sides of this debate to be struggling with
ideologies that are based on great leaps of faith. Both have a lot
to say in terms of evidence and how this breaks down, but Ken Ham is
right in his assertion that we weren't there to witness when or how
it happened, so everything we believe is in fact faith based.
I didn't bring this up to discuss
evolutionary science and creationism, but rather to discuss the wave
of criticism Bill Nye received for accepting Ken Ham's invitation to
participate in this debate. People were outraged, thinking that the
very act of entering into this debate means he is giving
“creationism” credibility, and that he was doing a huge
disservice to science by pretending that there was anything to debate
at all. This mindset for me is terrifyingly dogmatic, as it sets up
a precedence that says what we know is true and factual, and not up
for debate, even when what they know is true and factual is only
based on the presuppositions they hold, that is, things they presume
to be true but can't actually prove.
Much in the same way I consider our
knowledge of God to be deeply flawed, I also feel that our knowledge
of the ancient world, as well as the cosmos is also, in all
probability, deeply flawed. Scientists are constantly learning and
updating their theories based on the latest “discoveries”, but
most of the information we know is derived at by making great leaps
of faith (even when they are disguised as practical predictions)
about certain events that are concluded as most probable.
If the Christian equation is that the
Bible claims God made the heavens and the earth in six days, and that
according to the genealogy listed, places creation sometime around
6,000 years ago, then all discoveries must fit within this time
frame for a Creationist, and if it doesn't, it must be reinterpreted, through the scope
of physical events that could have caused such and such to happen.
They point to catastrophic events such as a global flood as a viable
explanation. I don't know if it explains enough, but when you read
the research you can see why they think the way they do.
On the other side, you have a majority
of scientists who believe that 14 billion years ago, or there about,
there was this matter that exploded (big bang) that over the course
of 10 billion years created the universe we now live in and are
trying to understand. From there we have theory after theory of how
everything was formed, how life evolved, and how Dinosaurs went
extinct. What is not commonly understood however about this version
of the creation story is how this matter got there and where it came
from. In fact, I asked someone once about this, and they said that
scientists mostly consider this unknowable, and choose to spend their
efforts researching things we can know.
While all of this is considered the
consensus, it too is based in faith. It's believing in something
that cannot be proven, and basing all events after on such an
assumption. Both theories have a structure that relies heavily on
faith, and from that structure, the theories and mathematics take
shape to paint vastly different pictures. It is up to you to decide
which one is more rational, but to dismiss creationism as having
nothing to do with science, or not including it in the conversation
is absurdly closed minded given the leaps of faith we already take in
the more popular story of creation.
Perhaps the one thing that has made
many evolutionists uncomfortable in this present age is the growing
support among scientists, especially those who deal in biochemistry,
whose research has actually led them to conclude that basic Darwinian
theorem doesn't actually add up, and that it is entirely unlikely
that life just showed up on this planet on it's own. Some scientists
have the theory that the first cells actually arrived here from
outer-space, and that there is no way to tell exactly what it had
evolved from as it is virtually unknowable in our present age, but
could possibly be known some day.
Other scientists however have started to
embrace the idea of Intelligent Design, and while many of them make
no claims to religion, they insist it is much more likely that
something external, outside of our reality, must have set things into
motion and designed life to be the way it is.
Michael Behe, a biochemist and
professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, once
said in discussing what happened to him when he broke down the basic
structure of a cell and noticed it's complexity, that “A man from
primitive culture who sees an automobile might guess that it was
powered by the wind or an antelope hidden under the car, but when he
opens up the hood and sees the engine, he immediately realizes that
it was designed”.
What biochemists and other scientists
in related fields are coming to terms with, is the very notion that
even with all these great theories and things widely regarded as
factual, that the more we learn about that which we can actually
learn, that is that which can be studied in a lab and not just
through the schemes of presuppositions and careful mathematics, that
these things just don't add up. What's worst is that they have been
met at the crossroads of their discoveries by an increasingly vicious
body of “believers”, that is people who regard any notion of
creation or design as being rubbish while holding firmly to their own
beliefs in the very theory being questioned, in a similar fashion as
the Church once held on to it's position against science when these
theories were first introduced.
Instead of constructive and helpful
debate, these dogmatic scientists attack and devour all who oppose
their long held faith in a theory masked as scientific fact. They
compare evolution to things such as gravity, and grow mad at the
notion of anyone doubting it's existence. As I have sat on the
sidelines over the course of the past two decades trying to keep tabs
on the debate and hearing both sides, I have determined that the only
“rational” people in this debate are those who seem to be able to
embrace both points of views without clinging to their own supposed
ideas of what is true. Bill Nye spends a lot of time talking about
how important it is for kids to grow up with a “correct”
understanding of Science and how it works, but he fails to realize
how important it is to be exposed to various views as this alone can
teach our children to have critical minds willing to weigh evidence
and not to buy into everything they are told to believe.
Now, with that said, I wanted to shift
gears here and explain why I think the evidence of God is constantly
in front of us if we only knew what to look for. To think that
science could prove or disprove his existence is a stretch beyond any
faith that I could muster, but according to the Apostle Paul, God's
invisible attributes, or rather the evidence of His existence can be
found in nature. So let's examine real briefly something incredibly
fundamental, and that being atoms.
Atoms are commonly known as the
building block of matter. Atoms are small...incredibly small. It is
said that one million atoms lined up side by side are as thick as a
human hair.
Atoms are made of smaller parts called
protons, neutrons, and electrons. The protons and neutrons are in
the center of the atom, called the nucleus, which is one-millionth of
a billionth of the volume of the atom. I remember in biology class,
this is where we typically stopped in discussing atoms, but atoms are
actually made up of even smaller particles, and those
particles...yup, even they are made up of smaller particles, further
and further into the subatomic world.
Ever since the electron was discovered
in 1897, we have come across an astonishing number of new particles,
such as bosons, hardrons, baryons, neutrinos, mesons, leptons, pions,
hyperons, and taus. Glutons were discovered, which hold particles
together, and this has all led to an inconceivably small particle
called muon. By now somewhere around 150 subatomic particles have
been identified, with the latest being the terribly elusive but
important particle known as Higgs Boson.
The thing about particles is that they
are constantly in motion, exploring all possible paths from point A
to point B at the same time. Electrons for instance don't just
travel around a nucleus, but rather they are known to disappear and
reappear elsewhere without traveling the distance in between.
Particles vanish and then show up somewhere else, leaping from one
location to another, with no way to predict when or where they will
come or go. This movement is known as quantum leaps...and you
thought that was just a television show. A single electron can do
forty-seven thousand laps around a four-mile tunnel—in a single
second.
The fun thing about particles is that
they seem to always know what the other particles are doing without
any clear sign of communication. We can't predict what they are
going to do, or what path they are going to travel, but they seem to
always show up exactly in the right place they need to be. In other
words, in the sub-atomic world, things don't actually function the
way scientists have assumed the rest of the universe functions, as in
particular laws and motions that can be known. Things come and go,
disappear and appear, spring and leap and communicate and demonstrate
awareness of each other, all without appearing to pay any attention
to how the world is supposed to work.
Now here's the thing, all of this is
going on while you sit there...or stand...or whatever, unaware of
what goes on every fraction of every second of every day. The chair
you sit on, well that's just made up of atoms (which is actually
99.9% empty space). The computer you use? Well that operates the
way it does based on our knowledge of the quantum theory. It's all
invisible, all unseen, and yet as a unit, creates something
functional and physical that is, as best we can determine, real.
Tangible, material, physical objects,
well they are made up of particles in motion, bouncing off each
other, crashing into each other, coming in and out of existence
billions of times in billionths of a second, existing in ghost states
and then choosing particular paths for no particular predictable
reason. Your chair might seem solid, but that is a bit of an
illusion. Your chair is just a relationship of energy.
Everything, from planets to tea spoons
may appear to be solid, but are at their core endless frenetic
movements of energy.
Now consider you...yes you. You are
made up of trillions of atoms. You lose fifty to one hundred fifty
strands of hair each day (if you have hair that is), and shed ten
billion flakes of skin. Every twenty-eight days you get completely
new skin, and every nine years your entire body is renewed. Yet in
the middle of all this shedding and dying and changing and renewing,
somehow your body continues to remember “you”.
Your body is made up of around
seventy-five trillion cells, every one of those cells containing
hundreds of thousands of molecules with six feet of DNA in every cell
containing over three billion letters of coding. These cells are
potent blend of matter and memory—bones and hair and blood and
teeth and at the same time personality and essence and
predispositions and habits.
Millions of cells, drifting through the
universe, assemble and configured and finely tuned at this second to
be you, but inevitably moving on in the next seconds to be other
things and other people. The atoms that make you you in this very
second are not the same atoms that made you you a few minutes ago,
and yet you stayed the same, nothing changed except, well you
know...everything.
The basic elements of life are actually
quite common—hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and a few others.
The dirt below us, the sky above us, the sun, moon, stars, we're all
made of the same stuff. You share over 60 percent of your genes with
fruit flies, over 90 percent with mice, and 96 percent with large
apes...and yet your DNA is uniquely yours. You are not carbon
copies, you are a unique physical creature sustained by an immense
amount of energy going on at the sub-atomic level.
Through all of this, these trillions of
atoms, when put together responding to the coding and the unique
structure of who you are, make you you. Somehow these things know,
and are directed, and over the course of the seconds they stay with
the whole, they don't change it but rather become part of who you
are.
Those trillions of atoms that make you
you, they form molecules, and those molecules form cells, and those
cells form systems—nervous, immune, limbic, circulatory, digestive,
muscular, respiratory, skeletal, and so on. Those systems eventually
form a far larger, more complicated system which we know to be you.
Trillions of atoms coming and going, billions of times a second, all
of them knowing their place within the hierarchy that is you.
Do you understand how incredible this
is? What orders these things to respond the way they do? How they
they know where to go and what place they belong in the short moments
between when they enter and when they leave the hierarchy? Can we
assume that natural order just is, and that these things just exist,
and that all order is simply controlled chaos?
What's more, even with this natural
order, does this account for consciousness and awareness? For
poetry, and language, and society? Does this account for our ability
to have an invisible consciousness that responds to more than just
instinctive behavior? If you were taken a part, atom by atom, there would be nothing there that is uniquely you, and yet put together, not only do you exist visibly, but your consciousness is self-aware and function. Where is your consciousness? Is it in the wiring of your brain? Can electric pulses firing off in your brain somehow create a self-aware creature that lives for more than just being alive? That responds to more than just what is needed to survive?
We can make the bold claim that things
are the way they are and have always been the way they have always
been, and even that atoms are simply responding to natural order, but
in the end, the way our brains respond and perceive cannot be
accounted for by some natural phenomenon.
I believe that this energy that flows
through us, and that sustains life and creates consciousness and
order cannot be accounted for when we are considering something as
wonderful, and profound as natural order. This is why I consider it
a greater leap of faith to declare that all of this has happened
through accidents and wonderful coincidences. I find it completely
illogical to say that this hierarchy is formed without any real
intelligence navigating each moving piece, (all several trillion of
them) to respond and behave in the way they need to in order to
maintain the coding found in each of our unique strands of DNA.
I am convinced that scientists only accept the concept of a cosmic accident because there is no other possible explanation. I mean how lucky are we that glutons exist to hold all these particles together?
Once you remove God from the equation
you are left with what you must consider rational, which leaves many
to marvel at the incredible power of nature, while not seeing the
obvious and more practical solution of something external programming
this to happen. Logic would tell us when we come across a computer
that it was made by intelligence that exists outside of that
computers hierarchy. The computer responds to the way it was programmed to
respond until let's say a capacitor goes bad, or jumper short
circuits, and then what? The electricity stops and the computer stops functioning. When this happens to a living being, we call this death. Both things, a computer, and a human brain are complex machines that require electricity in order to function. Yet we can look at the brain and somehow call it, with all it's incredibly complexity and wiring, the product of billions of years of accidental progress guided by a natural order that in all practicality, shouldn't exist. To say all of this happened by accident
would be to deny the obvious.
It
doesn't matter what your view is on religion, or theology, these
things can be dismissed for many obvious flaws, but to dismiss the
notion of design by intelligence? You, my good atheist, have a lot
more faith than I ever could.
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