Call Me Crazy – I Believe God Created
11/15/15
Genesis 1
Sunday AM
For 2 weeks we’ve been in a series entitled, Call Me Crazy – where we’ve been talking about why we believe in the reliability of the Bible and the existence for God. Today, we’re going to look at why I believe in Creation.
Contrary to what some believe, I think many of the modern findings of contemporary science help to establish the reality that science and faith are not at war – but that science, when done right, points powerfully toward the existence of God and His creative genius as described in the Bible.
There are many who’d disagree w/ me. Prominent Darwinian evolutionist William Provine of Cornell University offers (5) inescapable conclusions if Darwin’s claims were true.
1. There’s no evidence for God
2. There’s no life after death
3. There’s no foundation for right/wrong
4. There’s no ultimate meaning for life
5. People don’t really have free will
Problem for Dr. Provine is recent scientific and astrological findings have so discredited Darwin’s theory that leading scientists from all over the world are jumping ship to believe in an intelligent designer.
Paleontologically speaking, such an angle leads to a bone of contention. Yet the truth of the matter is the two ideas are not really that hard to grasp.
I A Fundamental AXIOM
Science is an attempt to interpret the facts of nature to understand our origin and way of life
Theology is an attempt to interpret the reality of God through the words of the Bible
Now the Bible says God created the universe and gave us the Bible as a means of revelation to understand who He is. This tells is that if the Bible is God’s Word, then it shouldn’t be in contradiction to God’s creation.
Any conflict b/w science and the Bible either must be attributed to man’s misunderstanding and misinterpretation of either the Bible, or science – or both Bible and science.
II The Big QUESTION
Did God make man or did man make up God? Was man created in God’s image or is God in the imagination of man? Is man just a clever creature who somehow, some way, accidentally and spontaneously emerged from prehistoric slime?
When all the theories are boiled down to the basics, we have but (2) options for belief regarding our existence – either God created or we have evolved from nothing. Genesis 1
The basic idea of creation is simple. In the beginning God created – that is, an intelligent, capable designer spoke life into existence w/ the intent of giving life meaning/purpose.
If we were being honest, Gen. 1 is a simplistic way of how life began – WHY? I think it is b/c the intent of Genesis 1 isn’t to give us a detailed accounting of how God created but to give us an appreciation for the God who created. Meaning Genesis 1 is more about God than it is about creation. This doesn’t mean Genesis 1 is ambivalent and irrelevant on the topic of creation, but that it was never intended to conclusive, literal description either.
So whether you hold to a young or old earth theory, it might make for great dialogue/debate – but no one can know w/ great certainty how this all came to be. And b/c the Bible is about God and His plan of redemption, to get caught in the weeds of 2 of the 1189 chapters would be a grave mistake.
B/c of this and mankind’s thirst to understand and explain everything, man has come up w/ all kinds of theories – and the most commonly accepted theory today is the theory of evolution.
When I speak of the big idea of evolution – I’m referring of the amoeba to man theory.
This theory was adequately described in a Time Magazine article in 1993 entitled How Life Began – New Discovers Provide Surprising Answers to Age Old Questions. The article described how scientists believe how life on earth began some 4.5 bil. yrs. ago when the earth/moon were formed. Now scientist have no idea how this happened, but assumes that somehow something happened to form our earth/moon. Once formed, the article talked about how the earth/moon were bombarded by meteors likely destroying any semblance of life several times before life finally got a grip in the form of simple, single cell creatures. These single celled creatures began to show up some 2 bil. yrs. ago and began to evolve ultimately becoming vertebrates that evolved to become became amphibians, then reptiles, to birds, to mammals and eventually homo sapiens. And that is the basic theory of macroevolution.
Chances are if you’ve been through the educational system you’ve been taught this theory in some form or another and more often than not this theory was credited to a man named Darwin. But the theory of evolution has been around much longer than Darwin. A selection-ist theory can be traced as far back as 550 b.c. to a man named Alexander of Miletus who taught that life was generated from slime that grew in pools of stagnant water.
Apparently, one day Alexander was walking when he came upon a stagnant, stinking pool of water that caught his attention. Over the next few days as he passed by the pool he noticed movement walked by the next day it looked as if the pool there were little tiny creatures in the ooze wiggling around. As he observed these creatures over the next several hours/days, he noticed the creatures grew wings, floated to the surface and flew away.
Now we these creatures – mosquitos! But he decided that’s how life began! In his estimation, life was generated out of ooze/slime – basically the same theory espoused in the Time Magazine article.
Point – the idea of evolution has been around for a long time. Why? B/c people just don’t want to accept the idea that there’s a God who put it together. B/c if there’s a God who put it together than maybe we’re accountable to Him – and mankind tends to want his freedom – and evolution gives man the scientific justification to be FREE!
Problem is this theory is being peddled as fact in our schools and universities and the results are proving to be catastrophic on the well-being of man. For decades we’ve been taught that nothing plus time plus chance changes amoebas to astronauts, molecules to monkeys, and then monkeys to man. It is like a fairytale for adults that we’re being taught time plus chance can turn frogs into princes.
III Reasonable REASONS to Reject Evolution
I reject evolution b/c leading scientist are rejecting evolution – and it’s not b/c they’re believers but b/c of the lack of evidence for evolution.
Listen to Dr. Newton Tahmisian, a physiologist for the Atomic Energy Commission said, “Scientists who go about teaching that evolution is a fact of life are great conmen, and the story they’re telling may be the greatest hoax ever. In explaining evolution, we don’t have one iota of fact.”
Swedish embryologist, Dr. Søren Løvtrup, said: “I believe one day, the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science. When this happens, many people will pose the question, ‘How did this ever happen?’”
Many of the greatest scientists who’ve ever lived were creationists – Michael Faraday, Lord Kelvin, Joseph Lister, Louis Pasteur, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Sir William Ramsey, Lord Francis Bacon, Samuel Morris, and more.
I don’t have time to go into all the wacky science that’s involved in trying to support the theory of evolution so I’m going to hit the highlights on a few more prominent ones in my estimation. Some of them I mentioned last week like the failure of science to live w/in the laws of thermodynamics.
A The VIOLATION of Scientific Method
For something to be scientific it must be based on the Scientific Method. The Scientific Method is the means by which all science revolves.
The Scientific Method has (4) ingredients: (1) Observation. You’ve got to observe things to have the scientific method occur. (2) Hypothesis. Based on what has been observed a theory can be formed. (3) Testable. Can the hypothesis be replicated in a controlled environment? (4) Repeatable. Can the test of the hypothesis be repeated successfully?
Let’s take the Scientific Method and apply it to the idea of evolution. (1) Has anybody ever observed evolution? NO. Immediately we’re in the realm of speculation, not science – b/c to be science – it has to be observable. But (2) Can I form a hypothesis? Yes – only it begins in my imagination rather than from observation. (3) Can I now test my speculative hypothesis? Not really – especially when it comes to macroevolution. You can’t test the hypothesis of amoeba to man? Not w/out monkeying w/ the test. If you put all the element of DNA in a petri dish in a base solution, it’s just going to sit there and float. It’ll never evolve w/out outside intelligent assistance/design. So if it can’t be tested, and it can’t be repeated, then 3 of the 4 ingredients of Scientific Method have been violated in evolution. Evolution isn’t science; it is a religion requiring lots of faith.
B The REIMAGINING of the Origin of Life
How did life occur? If you believe the Bible, then you believe God authored life. God said, “Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind,” and it was so.
One theory of evolution (as late as 3/15) is that some germ of life from some distant place in space hijacked a meteor, and was carried to Earth and after surviving an impact that destroyed everything on the Earth except the earth itself – survived long enough to be the catalyst to spark life once life came around again – and that’s how life originated on Earth. Which begs the question – How did life originate somewhere out yonder in space? Listen to Time Magazine in 3/15
How did life on Earth start? Did it emerge from the primordial ooze as is popularly believed, or did it land here from a comet or some other celestial body? A new study in the journal Nature Chemistry provides strong evidence the ingredients necessary to concoct the first life forms did indeed exist on earth. The scientists say they used hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen cyanide and ultraviolet light – (3) basic elements that were available pre-life as we know it – to create the building blocks of compounds that eventually led to the genetic material all life on earth holds in common, DNA. The process also likely got some extraterrestrial help. They speculate that meteorites might have reacted w/ nitrogen in the atmosphere to create hydrogen cyanide, and that in water, that chemical could’ve interacted w/ both hydrogen sulfide and the sun’s UV light to generate life.
Another theory is spontaneous generation. Basically, there was nothing that somehow found something that spontaneously combusted to generate life.
Dr. George Wall, Professor Emeritus of Biology at Harvard, Nobel Prize in Biology, wrote in Scientific American on the origin of life: “There are only two possibilities as to how life arose: One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution. The other is a supernatural creative act of God. There’s no 3rd possibility.” He continues, “Spontaneous generation, that life arose from nonliving matter, was scientifically disproved 120 yrs. ago by Louis Pasteur and others. That leaves us w/ only one possible conclusion: that life arose as a supernatural creative act of God.” Sounds good? But listen to what he said next: “I will not accept that…, I can’t accept that philosophically, b/c I don’t want to believe in God.”
The only alternative to some form of evolution is special creation, which is unthinkable. Evolutionist Sir Arthur Keith
C Fixity of the SPECIES – Macro vs Micro
Another hurdle for evolution is transmutation across species. Can cells trans-mutate into something entirely different? No.
Now no one in religion or science disputes microevolution – that is that there is development and adaption w/in a species. But this isn’t the premise of the basic theory of evolution. Macroevolution, or the theory that life crosses species – meaning that reproduction doesn’t always come kind after kind. There has to be a transmutation b/w species that produces protozoa (a single cell organism) that can trans-mutate from one species to the next. Problem is there’s no proven scientific evidence to support this conjecture.
What does the Bible say about the species? Gn.1:11f
And God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth,” and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
after his kind – mutation w/in species
D The MARVEL of Micro-Biology
Charles Darwin said: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”
Can I take you on a little journey into the basic factory of life – in recent years scientist have mapped and documented the entire human genome – which is the chemical instructions inside every cell that contain the blueprints of life – and it al begins w/ a single simple cell – only a cell is not simple.
I’d like for you to listen to a description of a simple cell by Michael Denton, Evolution a Theory in Crisis. He writes, “Perhaps in no other era of modern biology is the challenge poised by extreme complexity and ingenuity of the biological adaptations more apparent than in the fascinating new molecular world of the cell.”
If we could magnify a cell what we’d see is an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we’d see millions of openings like the portholes of a vast space ship opening and closing and allowing a constant stream of materials to flow in and out. And if we were to enter one of those openings we’d find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. Somewhere along the line we began to believe that a simple cell that got a spark from some lightning bolt from heaven somewhere along the line went Woo! And came to life.
Picture a cell in your mind. If that’s difficult to imagine then picture a factory. If you’ve got a factory and you’re going to try to build something inside the factory then inside your factory you’re going to need machines. So picture the cell and inside the cell there are some machines. Science calls the machinery of the cell protein molecules. They’re so small that they have to be multiplied several million times before they’re even visible. They’re made up of several thousand atoms folded into this complex arrangements of a chainlike deal that looks like spaghetti. Now the avg. cell has 445 parts but can go up to 2000 parts. So picture a cell a factory. Inside the cell are machines. This machinery represents the protein molecules. Now there’s a problem. In order for the machinery inside the cell to work, they have to be put together just right.
It’s as if we went down to GM Plant and found that the plant manager has put a corvette in the corner. Problem – it’s not put together – but you can have it if you put it together. You walk over and you see the thousands of parts and wires along w/ a can of paint. Chances are you wouldn’t know where to begin. You might get some of it right. But you wouldn’t be able to get it all right. That’s the problem w/ the cell factory. It has the machine but all the parts are in boxes. And the cell doesn’t have the ability to put together the machinery.
Now the machine parts are called amino acids. So picture a box w/ 400 amino acids in it. That’s going to build our machine. Now the amazing thing about a cell is that it only works if all the amino acids string together in exactly the right order. If you mix one of them up, it won’t work. We have to get all the amino acids perfectly arranged.
Do you know the options on the amino acids are amazing. The number of options on amino acids outnumber the entire number of atoms on the planet earth. So picture this vast number of combinations that have to be put together just perfect. We need some instructions. So the cell has some instructions. It’s called DNA, which is the blueprint for the factory workers to put together the machinery which are the protein cells. That’s called DNA. All the instructions are in the DNA. Every DNA molecule has some 4 billion bits of information. They’re paired together and they look like a ladder. They float around and that’s the instruction manual to put it all together. The problem is the cellular protein molecules and amino acids can’t communicate w/ DNA b/c they speak different languages. Now that’s a real problem. So here we have a factory and we have machinery and we have boxes of parts and we have blueprints up in the main office, but nobody can go up in the main office and get them. That’s a real problem. We need a communications dept. – RNA. The DNA molecule that looks like a ladder, it untwists and it splits apart and the RNA comes up right next to it and makes a photocopy of the DNA. Now the RNA is bilingual, it can talk DNA and amino acid. So the RNA floats over to this box of 400 amino acids and says – ok, you get there, you get there, you get there, etc. and puts it all together in a perfect string and boom! It turns into a protein molecule, a machine and now we’re ready to start producing something. For one protein. Just for one! The most simple cell has 239. This DNA and RNA copying process is a fascinating thing – 4 billion bits of information.
Let’s assume you wanted to pass on 4 bil. bits of info to someone so you hire a secretary. This secretary would have to type over 4 bil. bits of info. It’d take your secretary 40 hours typing 6,000 words a minute to make that copy. Furthermore, DNA to RNA is so accurate our secretary couldn’t make one mistake in 40 hours at 6,000 words a minute. Anybody know a secretary w/ that kind of skill?
You know what I call that, FAITH. I’m telling you evolution is a religion. It takes a lot of faith to believe that keyboard could produce 4 bil. bits of info w/out a mistake. So to think that some primeval cell in bubbly goop on a prehistoric Earth could produce such complexity – I’d say that is a lot farfetched. How farfetched?
Let’s take the simplest living cell. This cell would need 239 proteins. That’s so simple there isn’t even one in existence. Each protein w/in that cell would need on the average 445 amino acids. All lined up in a perfect roll to work. That’s what we need to get that one spark of life. Now to illustrate how difficult that might be, picture 10 pennies in my hand, I’ve numbered them 1 to 10 and I’ve put them in my pocket. I shake them up. This illustrates one protein, not 239. It illustrates 10 amino acids not 445. Reach in and pull out the 1st penny, the odds of me pulling out penny #1 is 1 in 10. I put that penny back in my pocket and shake it up. I’m on a roll so I’m going to pull out #2. What are the odds of pulling out #1 and #2 – 1 in a 100. I put it back in my pocket and mix them up again and I’m going to pull out #3 this time. What are the odds of pulling out #3 – 1 in 1000. If I put that penny back and continue to do that 10x for just 10 amino acids for getting them in the right order is one chance in 10,000,000. And we’re not talking about 239 proteins w/ 445 amino acids each, but one protein w/ 10 amino acids.
Now I want to take you to the next step. Take your one protein (not 239), w/ just an avg. chain of 445 amino acids. The rules of Random Selection tells us that the odds of those amino acids forming themselves in a perfect line is 1 in 10331 power. Now to put that in perspective, the total number of all the fundamental particles in all the universe is 10134 power. That means there aren’t enough fundamental particles in the entire universe to illustrate the odds of just one protein getting it right. The time required to get it right based upon random selection is 10243 billion years. That’s a long time – so much time there’s not enough time to run the illustration.
That’s why I’m here to tell you that evolution is religion. It takes a lot of faith to believe that all happened.
One more illustration. Let’s talk about one simple cell – so simple it doesn’t even exist w/ the 239 proteins – and inside each protein are 20 amino acids. According to scientists, the odds of arranging them mathematically and getting it right are 1 in 10137,915 power. This is why nearly every molecular biologist has such a problem in buying into evolution. They know it couldn’t have happened. Life can’t get organized and spring into existence, it’s too complex.
George Wall, wrote, “One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that spontaneous generation of living organisms is impossible.” Even still, b/c of his bias, Walled said, “I choose to believe that which I know is impossible rather than accept the unthinkable – which is special creation.”
Somebody is trying to make a monkey out of you.
