I've recently been intrigued by snowflakes. Have you ever looked closely at a snowflake? It's amazing what you can learn about God by looking at the things he created. By looking at a single snowflake, we can learn that God is an awesome, creative God. He pays attention to detail and he is an intricate designer. All the computers in the world could not make something as beautifully complex as the snowflake. No explosion of chemicals could form the designs and patterns of God's creation.
The sad thing is that people would like us to believe that our whole world is an accident. They'd like to tell us that we weren't created with a purpose, we are just some organization of gases. But how do we have thoughts and emotions? Even our mind testifies to the greatness of our God!
Job 12:7-12
But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you; or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind. Does not the ear test words as the palate tastes food? Wisdom is with the aged, and understanding in length of days.
Psalm 19:1-3
The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard.
Science classes can be very convincing. Don't let them fool you.
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ReplyDeleteYour command of Scripture is excellent, April!
ReplyDeleteYes, the Lord is glorified in all of His creation, especially the beauty of His snowflakes. Irreducible complexity...such a wonder!
I've missed you making regular posts! I think the world out there needs to hear more of this God-exalting talk :)
I've been following your blog for some time, and I've refrained from commenting since I don't wish to start an argument or offend anyone, but this particular post bothered me enough that I feel compelled to respond.
ReplyDeleteIn this post, I feel that you very unfairly pit science (or scientific explanations) and belief in God against each other, as if they are contradictory ideas, or as if you can't accept both at the same time.
What disturbed me the most, though, is this statement: "He pays attention to detail and he is an intricate designer. All the computers in the world could not make something as beautifully complex as the snowflake. No explosion of chemicals could form the designs and patterns of God's creation."
Ignoring the fact that this is flat-out false, and much MUCH more complex structures HAVE been generated randomly using computers and algorithms, I would like to ask you this question. Do you honestly believe (as I know you believe about life and living things since you do not accept evolution) that God miraculously handcrafted every single snowflake or ice crystal that ever fell to earth? Your statement seems to show that you think it's impossible for something as relatively simple as a snowflake to be created through a natural process following the laws of Chemistry and Physics. This process is called crystalization and it's well understood (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystalization). In light of what you just said, it seems that you would place this and indeed any natural process in the same class as you would place evolution, that being human explanations to explain the beauty of the natural world without God.
So, I ask you again. Do you think it's possible that God might be the one who SET UP such processes as crystalization, planetary formation or evolution in the first place? Or do you honestly think that accepting the role of a natural process for the presence of "complex" things on earth (such as living things or ice crystals) automatically means that they happened "by accident?"
If this is really what you believe, then in my opinion, it's a shallow, stupid and completely dishonest worldview, and your last statement shows this more than anything else. "Science classes can be very convincing. Don't let them fool you." Seriously? You think a natural, scientific explanation for something, which has been tested and proven to be true, is foolish, just because, in your view, it makes something beautiful to be possibly without God's DIRECT intervention? If that's the case, then you may as well throw out every single thing that the study of science has given us in the last 5,000 years, and go back to living in the dark ages, because that is exactly where this kind of worldview would take us.
ReplyDeleteTo give my own opinion, science is not in any way shape or form incompatible with a belief in God, or even with a belief in YOUR God. God could have created this world using any number of natural processes, without controlling every quantum diceroll and handpainting every snowflake or plant or human being. The purpose of science is to answer the question "HOW," while the purpose of religion or theology is to answer the question "WHY." Neither one has to rely on the other, nor is either one refuted by the other. Sure, some people believe that everything happened by accident, and this may even be what our modern understanding of science shows. But that doesn't mean that it DID happened by accident. You, however, seem to be convinced that ANY scientific or explantion automatically means rejecting the idea of a God our creator, and this nothing but a complete lie, and a false dichotomy. BOTH can exist at once, and do whether you think it's possible or not. I seriously hope you see how shallow and limited this point of view is, April, because it's a dangerous one, and I know that you're more intelligent than that.
And if you ignored my comment or didn't understand it because I used too many "big words" then I'd definitely be interested in hearing what Chris or Jason have to say, particularly why Chris didn't see this post as nothing more than a narrow-minded attack on scientific understanding.
Cheers, and happy new year to all.
-Kevin
Oh, and by the way Jason, there is no such thing as "irreducible complexity," and even then, the idea applies only to living systems, NOT snowflakes. Nice try.
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ReplyDeleteFirst of all, Kevin, in no way did I mean that science entirely was against God, only certain theories.
ReplyDeleteBut Kevin, I am sorry, but I don't know how you want me to respond to your comment. Most of the questions you asked me were questions that you know already or just want to start a debate with. I believe in the Bible in it's entirety and nothing less. If I were to say that God and evolution are compatible, I would be saying that the Bible is not entirely true and therefore, it cannot be trusted.
I also know that neither of us are convincing each other, but you wanted me to respond, so I did.
..and also I apologize for not addressing some things you wrote. This is simply because I don't understand all of the scientific mumbo jumbo.. maybe Chris would be better at that.
Dear Kevin Buchik:
ReplyDeleteAfter hearing about your response to April's post during Bible Study, I decided to go online and actually take a look at what you said. I am not afraid of "big words" (indeed I saw nothing remotely challenging in your post) and I do not intend to avoid any argument of yours with any mumbo jumbo turnarounds or avoidances. Indeed, I don't need to, for the logical, forensic, and scientific argument in general is flawed due to your false assumptions upon which your criticism is based. I am a seasoned veteran of such objects, and have devoted years and hours of my life in careful study of more things related to them than you might be able to even imagine. It amuses me to see a person such as yourself take a positive article such as this and then use it to boost your ego by criticizing how "stupid" it is.
You say that in April's post that she "very unfairly" pits science against belief in God and that she portrays them to be "contradictory" to one another. However, you were forced to add "or scientific explanations" in parenthesis because you know that April in fact did not say that science in and of itself was bogus, but that when she added the line that said that science classes could be misleading (the only line which even mentions science throughout the entire post) she was clearly referring to the Darwinian theory of evolution.
This is accepted in the politically correct circle of the Scientific Community, but the popularity of an idea has nothing to do with whether or not it is a fact. We know this well from history, as in the days of Galileo a major idea that was accepted in the Scientific Community was that the Earth was flat, and that it was the center of the Universe. Careful study of scripture and of scientific evidence would have shown them that the Earth was indeed round, but anyone who dissented for it was either arrested or simply burned at the stake.
In Psalm 19 the Sun is described as a bridegroom saying that "It rises from one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other; nothing is hidden from its heat." If the earth was flat, the Sun would not have any circuit. Thus, that is one flaw in such an argument However, this passage is used by many to say that the Bible is innacurrate in stating that the Sun goes around the earth. But many authors in many books today use phrases such as "and the sun set silently in the west" or "even as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west". Are these authors making statements saying that scientific knowledge is wrong? No. They are saying that the Sun rises in the east SECTION OF THE SKY. In hebrew, "sky" is most often expressed using the term "heavens", such as in Genesis chapter 1. There is no statement in the bible, other than this, which refers to the relationship between the Sun and the Earth. Psalm 19 is a PSALM, which is a song of praise and worship to God. The Sun is not a person, but this is a literary device here known as personification, as it is a song. And the author of that Psalm is no more scientifically incorrect in his usage of the term than it is to say that the sun "rises in the east and sets in the west" for indeed it does. In terms of Meteorology, this is a very accurate statement. Why does the Bible not speak of the Astronomical relationship? The Bible is a text that tells us how we relate to God, and how He made the world. It teaches us how to respond to Him. The fact that one body orbits another in a specific way was not important as it related to living a godly life. The Bible is perfect. It doesn't tell you unnecessary things that people never needed to be in there to begin with. But, even though Galileo proved mathematically that the Earth revolved around the Sun IN SPACE, the Scientific Community chose not to accept such a ludicrous idea, because it was an established principle.
Anyway, all that to say this, that even though the Scientific Community may have advocated a certain "explanation", that does not mean necessarily that it is true. They were 100% sure that Galileo was wrong, but he was correct. Thus, since an idea can be accepted 100%, and still be wrong, popularity is no argument.
ReplyDeleteDarwinian Theory is not immune to this fact, that being popular does not make it true.
In your response to April's post you said that science was for "HOW" and that religion was only for "WHY". However, you are incorrect in this assumption. Science and religion both tell HOW and WHY, and yet
they both do not. It is also important to use an INFORMED definition of the actual word "science".
I do not believe that Darwinian Evolutionary Theory is an example of good "science".
According to Merriem-Webster.com, "Science" is "[1]the state of knowing, [2]a department of systemized knowledge as an object of study,
or [3] knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained or tested through scientific method."
The "scientific method" is only listed by the third definition as part of the word "science", because most science falls under the 2nd definition as being a "department of systematized knowledge as an object of study."
When you say "science", that does not automatically mean "scientific method." The root which the English word "science" is derived from means "having knowledge". So science is anything KNOWN. Basically, a
good substitute for the word SCIENCE could be TRUTH. Truth science, science truth, either one is something that we know. Darwinian Theory in and of itself is not NATURAL, or EXPERIMENTAL science, because it cannot be tested by the scientific method. In order to do so, you would need to created 4 or 5 brand new earths, and then study them for many
years to see if life arises spontaneously upon them or not, and then do so being sure that each world was similar to earth and that no microbes contaminated your results from the sensory equipment that you were
using to test it with. This is impossible.
So are a great other many things that are possible to prove SCIENTIFICALLY but not necessarily with the SCIENTIFIC METHOD. For example, I was born in Des Plaines, around 15 years ago more or less. This is not something that you can prove using the SCIENTIFIC METHOD.
This type of science is called FORENSIC, and is used frequently for court cases to prove innocence and guilt, and in issues such as parentage, to discover who a persons' genetic father or mother happened to be. It is the same science that Sherlock Holmes uses in the famous series of novels, and uses a process
called "deductive reasoning", which takes known scientific information and puts clues together to discover how and when an event took place, and in many cases also why.
Since we cannot create the earth again, Darwinian Theory is no more provable by the scientific method than the existence of God is.
It is an issue of FORENSICS and not one of EXPERIMENTATION. You claim that Science is only concerned with "HOW", and yet Darwinian Theory attempts the exact same thing that our Bible does by trying to explain WHY there
is an earth, and WHY there is life on this earth. Darwin claims that nothing could create life. The Bible says that God, the being who created the heavens and the earth, could create life.
Using logical and scientific principles alone, which is statement has more evidence? By logic alone God wins.
It is an established SCIENTIFIC principle that life does not arise spontaneously, contradicting one of the major arguments of the Darwinist's explanation for WHY life exists on earth. This principle was determined by Louis Pascal, in his famous experiment in which he sterilized one flask of chicken broth as a control, did not sterilize the other, and observed them both over a period of days. The normal flask grew lots of bacteria, while the sterilized flask grew none. This continued indefinitely. Thus, Pascal concluded that life does not arise
ReplyDeletespontaneously, as had been previously thought in his time. It has been an established fact ever since, and by this fact alone the ENTIRE
DARWINIAN THEORY is completely and utterly FLAWED. There is more evidence that I could bring up, but I do not care to, for it is an
exhaustive amount this is enough for this section of my argument.
In response to your argument saying that a computer could create very easily something as "simple" as a snowflake, I would like you to turn on your computer and observe it, for the next 1,000 years and check every day to see if there is a snowflake sitting for you on the mouse pad. I'm not sure you realize how very complex a physical snowflake actually IS, but I ask you to think about this.
If I write an algorithm, and I program it exactly into the computer, and an image, a copy of what a snowflake looks like, appears on the screen, WHO made the snowflake?
Was I INDIRECTLY involved in creating it? If I were to sell the IMAGE of the snowflake, WHO would the customer make out the check to? To my computer? No. It is MY snowflake. I designed it. I created it. It's mine.
Only instead of using pixels to create images of snowflakes on a computer, God uses water droplets suspended thousands of feet up in the
air to create real snowflakes.
Their His. He made them.
Good Luck on that Computer Experiment. I'm interested in hearing the conclusion to your results.
With Sincerity and Great Civility,
Brett Benischek