Thursday, February 7

Who Am I?


Good movie- sure, Jackie Chan is great!

But, getting down to it, before we ask if something is true, we need to know if we're able to find out. Is it knowable? Can we know? What is knowledge? What are we, to even ask that question?

If we follow that line of thinking from the popular assumption that we are all random collections of cells, which we assume are random collections, ultimately, of atomic particles, then lose three key pieces to finding out any answers. Life, order, and personality. In a random universe there is no way for any of them to develop, and for them to exist is a direct violation of the laws of science.

First, Life may be continued from one organism to its offspring, but it is not reproducible. Even the most orderly and controlled experiments fail, and the model for life's origins is neither. The one experiment, decades old now, that was claimed to have produced "life in a test tube" was shown, in attempts to repeat it, that the first container had not been sufficiently sealed, and the "findings" turned out to be contamination! If you are alive, that life came from somewhere.

Order, whether living or inert, always tends toward disorder. A pile of mud has yet to collapse upward into a brick office building. In fact, it takes a lot of energy in baking the brick, producing the steel straps, making the mortar, and developing and using the skills to lay the bricks to keep those bricks from too soon collapsing back into a pile of mud! Or, can an old person naturally grow young? Some might point out that young people, especially Japanese, are growing taller than previous generations, but a closer look shows nutrition, and not some genetic mystery, as the cause. More energy going into a system, more energy inherent in the system; but the "energy" will dissipate, and those young
will also soon be old.

Physics tells us that everything comes from something. Energy cannot be created or destroyed within the limits of our material Universe, and all matter (anything that can have any weight or take up any space) is, in simple terms, compressed energy. Everything has a source, and the source is always greater. The ball might be rolling down hill, but how did it get up there? It made for a silly song a few years ago, but we really don't look for three-pound birds laying five-pound eggs, do we? If our lives have a source, and that source is greater then it can't have been a chimp, a frog, or a pond scum, can it? If we apply this to the Universe itself, the entire Universe had to have come from something, as
it cannot have created itself, and it has to have been designed and fashioned to possess such amazing order and complexity. It doesn't quite look like we're alone, does it?

The mind, and personality, raise the stakes considerably. At last look, "Modern Science" still does not know what the mind is, and assumes it to be located in the skull just for the sake of discussion. When we go from the mind to the intricately complex personality, all bets are off. The one explanation left on the table is, "In the beginning, God..!"

So, if we want to know who we are, the question is askable. The answer is knowable, because there is an orderly, created, reality which can be known. That we can know, and the Universe can be known, suggests that there is a Creator, an Artist, if you will, who wishes to be known in it.

All this is based on those first three words in the Bible. Wonder what else is there!

6 comments:

  1. Physics tells us that everything comes from something. Energy cannot be created or destroyed within the limits of our material Universe, and all matter (anything that can have any weight or take up any space) is, in simple terms, compressed energy. Everything has a source, and the source is always greater.

    Good science info provided. Even if I was not a Christian, I would at least be a theist and perhaps a deist since it seems more reasonable the source of finite matter is an infinite, eternal being, rather than the Universe existing from nothing, being unplanned.

    Russ:)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, Russ!

    People say we "can't prove God," but I think that's about on the level, most of the time, as a little boy saying he can't hear his mother calling him, at least until the game is over. He has "not left Himself without a witness," and, "there is no speech nor language tongue where His voice is not heard!"

    ReplyDelete
  3. Good post!

    Earlier, I was reading about the very complex and exacting process involved in blood clotting (in Michael J. Behe's "Darwin's Black Box"), and how certain proteins are dependent on other proteins, but those other proteins are dependent on still other proteins, etc. The cascade is a confusing maze of events that depend on exact timing. The chance that this one single process could have evolved by accident, with so many things depending on so many other things, is so astronomical that, even given billions of years, is not logical. Realizing that the blood clotting process is merely one of a huge list of incredible, mind-boggling processes that take place in the human body (let alone all the other processes taking places in animals, birds, fish, the universe, etc.), the idea of Darwinian, chance macroevolution being the explanation for the origin of life and the universe becomes absurd. And not only does Darwinian Evolution (which is not a fact, because it has not be proven; and does not even truly qualify as a Scientific Theory, because it is not testable or falsifiable) fail to provide the missing links in the fossil record, but it fails to explain the origin of the smallest particle of matter. Creation teaches that God is eternal. Yet, even Darwinian Evolution must believe that something was eternal (i.e., the parts of an atom, etc.) And theories such as those teaching that we came from aliens really do nothing for the origin of all life, because we must then ask where those aliens came from.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Jeff, that is good stuff to know! I believe, though I have not worked down all the steps, that every field of human knowledge is, at the bottom, theology. God gave us the Universe as His "calling card," so that none of us, no matter how remote from "Christendom" or the nearest Bible, is without excuse, His very majesty and Godhead being presented in every big and small detail of Creation. At the same time He has placed in each of us a nascent desire to know Him, though we perceive that desire in many different forms due to the damage of the Fall.

    So, when we study any aspect of Creation we are examining the calling card of the Creator. Some take the trouble to notice the print on the card (good theology) while others, not wanting to acknowledge His Lordship, spend their time trying to discredit those "accidental markings" by running trivial tests on the PH or rag content of the paper (bad theology). In fact, the one reason for this Universe to exist, we can say, is theology!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Robert,

    Amen!

    Your words reflect Romans chapter 1, verses 19 and 20:

    "...since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 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."

    ReplyDelete
  6. Right on, Jeff! And the most beautiful part is that the one theme that occurs over and over is His providence, His compassion, His mercy: His love! When we move over into the next oldest witness (or third oldest, if you count human nature as a separate category) which is the Old Testament, the Self-emptying love (chesed) of God is enough to give us an extreme case of vertigo- It just turns the Universe upside down!

    ReplyDelete

So what's your take?