Thursday, May 8, 2014

Apology Accepted

For the last several years while building the Mission House as well as fitting into the culture and climate of the D.R. I have also delved deeper into studies of why things work the way they do in the world looking at these things from an old Biblical perspective.  The study of Apologetics has been around for many years, even going back before Christianity itself was birthed early in the first century.  For those of you who know about apologetics I will commend you.
If you don't know about Apologetics I can tell you it is not a study on how to apologize for being a Christian.
Apologetics is a somewhat little used area of base philosophy that looks at all aspects of creation within the physical world as well as the spiritual world and attempts to explain "God" throughout the results we perceive and or experience.
Let me say this another way...this is the proof that God leaves behind in everything He does.  Apologetics roots out the proof through deductive reasoning, logic, philosophy and just plain old common sense.

Scripture tells us that we should be able to talk to anyone that asks us why we believe what we believe.  What is the truth behind our belief and why?  1 Peter 3:15 states implicitly this, "but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence" NASB

Apologetics does exactly this.
There are apologetic studies in virtually every field of science and philosophy known to man today.
Some are extremely confusing and require a lot of study in order to make sense of and others are fairly easy to get your head around.
The thing to consider here is that this area of study I believe is important for the believer who may need to build up his Faith in God.  It is important for the person who doesn't necessarily doubt his belief in Jesus but may have questions that are coming at you all the time.  
Let us consider a few questions that are always used by atheists as  ammunition against Christianity and the existence of God therefore.
One of the biggest doubts and hardest topics of them all is the question of evil.  For centuries non-believers and believers alike have stated "How can a good God allow evil to reign in the world like it does?"  The ramifications of individual situations with respect to this question are far reaching.  One individual who loves and believes God can go through horrific events like war or maybe even a close family dying through tragedy.  These events can cause Faith to waiver and many individuals can come to a point where they might just stop believing that there really is God in their lives.

Happens all the time.  So how are those involved in these events deal with the evil that comes upon them?  Where was God when they were crying out?  
Let's look briefly at a couple of things here...we can have two perspectives for pairing a good God with evil in the world: either logically or through probability.
Logically it does not follow that God exists alongside evil simply because if you state logically the following, if God exists then evil cannot exist
since evil exists then God does not exist

But this logical statement in fact holds no basis for an argument.  Atheists will assume that because God has no use for evil that logically He cannot exist.  We simply do not know what God is doing with evil from a moralistic point of view.  We have neither the intellect nor understanding of God's use of evil for the world. 
We react based on what we see and experience, but God knows the outcomes of all of these things in advance and in the future.  We of course want to try to understand and sometimes the answer is not so obvious.  Take for example, a dying child with Leukemia....many of us can relate and maybe some of us have experienced this kind of tragedy that can be perceived as evil from God.  But is it really?
Frankly, from a logical point of view, it would appear that God is evil.
Let me continue with another perspective, probability shows that it is more likely that God exists in our lives and world and universe simply because of all the rest of the evidence which supports His existence.  Take for example, The Big Bang.  Scientists all over the world now believe almost unanimously that everything came into being from a singular event some time ago and all that you see on this world and in our ever expanding universe came from nothing.  Before this event there had to be nothing, not even time...everything began at this one point in time.  With a gigantic explosion that produced all the matter, all the energy, all the planets and stars and then life on earth.
All of the known laws of science that man understands today all point toward this singular event.
The atheists and agnostic communities have no answer for this.  The atheist position prior to this discovery had been that the universe had always existed and that over these eons of years, life and therefore humanity has evolved out of the matter around.  It actually makes sense until the realization of the truth of how our universe began is taken into account...from a singularity.  We know this now to be true because we can actually see the billions of stars and planets moving away from a singular point...extrapolating backwards means you come to a point when all the matter in the universe was in one place and something caused it to explode and begin to expand away from this one point in space.  Of course science does not yet have an answer for what caused this "Big Bang" and even if science can discover what was the cause, it can never answer the question of why? Science is cold, science is fact and science is unremorseful.  God is the only answer that can justify the conditions of life and the universe as we know it today.

Let's look into another bit of science that man has not yet figured out, a conundrum if you will.  This little problem of DNA.  This is the nail in the coffin of all atheism and yet they still deny the truth.
DNA is the most amazing building block of life necessary and contained within all living matter on earth.  DNA is the common thread that runs throughout life and still remains a mystery to science.
Man has been able to decipher the DNA code that forms life, made simply of a handful of simple proteins that contains the information necessary in building cellular material in an organism.  Unfortunately science has yet to discover how any of this could have arisen from a pool of historic pond sludge which may have contained the necessary elements required for life.
The fact is this, the more we come to understand all the necessary components required for even constructing a single cell organism the probability of this even occurring by chance become exponential, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 in 10^40000.  This is for only one single cell occurring by chance!  The same odds are necessary for lipids and simple carbohydrates necessary for life to happen.  Now we are talking exponential impossibilities!  There is simply far too much complexity in all of life right from the building blocks of amino acids in DNA to the irreducible complexity of an eyeball in all living creatures that raises questions against macro-evolution.
This complexity is not random and in fact far too consistent and similar within life of all forms not to rule out the presence of some intelligent design.  Bottom line, you cannot get the level of information required in all of the DNA and cellular bodies that make up a human and not avoid the mathematical impossibility of randomness as the answer.  We are not an accident.  I may not understand all the processes that go into the science of DNA and genetic sequencing but I can do the math.

Atheists can and likely will continue to debate that God exists, because that is what they do.  I understand they think they are fighting for an independence of self.  I get that, I mean we all love to think that we did something or achieved a greatness on our own without any kind of divine intervention or help.  I'll give you an example...I am a chef and I know how to make the most amazing prime rib roast...starting with a beautiful cut of aged Angus Rib Roast moving through a series of steps involving seasoning, tying up the roast so it does not fall apart in the oven, then roasting at the right temperature for the exact time necessary to produce the most rich, succulent, mouth watering slice of heaven you will ever taste.  A hint of garlic, distinct flavor of Rosemary and pepper, the saltiness of the rich gravy alongside the perfectly roasted Herb crusted Baby Red Potatoes.  All of this nestled on a plate beside fresh steamed asparagus seasoned with lemon butter.  Who's hungry now?

I described only a tiny talent available to any of us and all of us if we put our minds to it to learn something.  The point is this, as humans we have the ability to learn anything another human can do or think of.  That is uncanny.  Think about it...someone thought about and built a boat to sail across the ocean and discover this island...I can do that too, if I learn how.  Someone thought and built a craft that can escape the earth's gravity and sail off into deep space to land on the moon and Mars...I can do that, if I learn how.  Someone thought and built a device to see into the tiniest organisms to see how they are put together and how those building blocks are used to build the material which makes up the organism!  I can do that...if I learn how.
The greatest apologetic reason we have available to us for the reasoning behind whether or not God is real is right here.  In us. Now I am not going to open up a debate as to how old the earth is and whether or not you are a young earth believer or old earth believer is beside the point.  Is it possible the earth could be older than the Bible says it is?  Yes I suppose because we are not sure, but it is also possible that God made it to look as old as it is...after all He is God right?  He can do anything right?  Here's the point, we just don't know, but this we do know.  Humanity is the most complex organism around today:  the most sentient, intelligent and capable of many great things, achievements, abilities, talents, etcetera...the list is endless.  Humanity only appeared a few years ago relative to the  age of all things we see and know now...or did we?  I am going to go back to the math problem I started with about life existing.  Science has a problem...a problem that is growing bigger and bigger and more complex every time they discover another bit of information that defines us, that defines life.  Each tiny little discovery adds another dimension of mathematical improbability to the equation of life...an already impossibly small probability of chance that even one single celled organism could have been formed by accident...let alone the multi-billioned cell creature, that can reason, and design and build and learn and communicate like we do.  And all of us almost 7 billion now having got to this level of intellect in less than 10,000 years!  But it gets worse folks...someone designed and built the tower of Babel!  Someone designed and built the Great Pyramids!  Someone designed and built a great big boat and filled it with animals a long time ago!  That was over 3000 years ago folks. Actually I must correct myself...it was God who designed the ark and told Noah how to build it...but Noah still built it!  Oh, I guess I can't use that one because the atheists and agnostics require proof.
How can the atheists deny their own existence?  How can atheists stare blankly at the masterpiece of humanity and deny that the artist is greater than any one of us?  Or all of us put together?
I am sorry...I do not have the faith to be an atheist.  I would have to deny everything that even science has discovered and put together about life and our existence.

But no matter how much proof we can throw at them about what God has built in our own universe and in our own complex bodies, they will never understand until they get out of their own way and let God reveal himself directly to them one at a time. No man or woman will ever convince another that God exists through anything we can say or do.  But we might plant a seed in their lives.  Me might get them to ask the same questions as I did...and those questions will start them on a journey seeking truth...and then they will find God.  So that's it then...we must continue to speak the truth about what we believe when we are given the opportunity.  Once we have a believer coming to us with questions about God it is our directive if you will to make them disciples once God has revealed himself and they believe.  It is God who does the work in any individual, not us doing the work in them.  It is only God who reveals himself inside the believer.

My prayer is this quite simply, "If you are asking the same questions as I am, "How is this possible?  Why are we here?  What is life all about?"  Then you can do one of two things.  Believe the evidence or deny the evidence.  I pray that you believe.  God already told us what He did, "For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother's womb. 14I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Your works, And my soul knows it very well.…Psalm 139:13

Never doubt for a second who made you, no matter how much people through the evil question at you...no matter how much evil you see around you.  I know it's hard, I see the same thing you all are seeing.  But I cannot deny Him, and I don't claim to know why He allows so much evil to continue.  But folks know this, we live in a fractured world, full of fallen people, and I choose to believe in God who has made me not because the math tells me so, that's the obvious stuff.  I choose to believe Him because He chose me first...and that's amazing.

In Love






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