Author: Minimalist Christian

Do we worship the same God?

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There is and can only be one God.

I am not going to defend that statement but to take it as read and see where it leads in the context of different religions.  If you don’t want to accept the statement, this post is not for you so please don’t waste your time and energy reading further.

There is and can only be one God.

That one God is love.  Without God there can be no love.  And so each and every act of love is an act of God.  If a Christian loves, that is God within them.  If a Moslem loves then that is God within them.  If an atheist loves that is God within them.

That one God created and sustained the universe. He sends the rain on the good and the bad.  His laws of science knit us together in our mother’s womb, allow us to experience the world, and present us with the alternatives of love or hate, good or evil.

That one God has made each of us as an individual.  Each of us is a ‘me’.  He has given us freedom to choose to love or hate, to be good or evil.  As individuals we choose.  If we choose to love we choose God whether we know it or not, whether we are Christian, Moslem, Hindu, atheist, agnostic or Jedi.

If someone prays to the single God, creator and sustainer of the universe, to the God who is love, the God who is goodness and power, does it matter what religion they are in?

If someone chooses love and goodness, does it matter what religion they are in?

What is religion? According to the Oxford dictionary it is:

“The belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods”

and

“A particular system of faith and worship”

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/religion

A follower of one religion can challenge whether the “system of faith and worship” of another religion is accurate.  A Christian can reasonably challenge whether what Islam teaches about what is right and wrong is right – but can a Christian challenge which God a Moslem is praying to? Or vice versa?

Can a Christian say that a Moslem worships a different God?  Or can the Christian only say to the Moslem that “you don’t know God like I do”?

I don’t need to use Christians and Moslems for the example.  I could have used Evangelical and Liberal Christians, Protestants and Catholics.

I believe that the teaching of Christ is the best description of what God intends for each of us, and that Jesus life and death are the greatest demonstration of how God loves each and every one of us.  I can guide others to the same source of love and goodness that I have found, but am I to criticise and judge them if they do not understand the Bible in the same way that I do?  Isn’t my job to love, and aren’t I supposed to leave the judgement up to God?

Isn’t religions job to help me do my job?  Surely religion is not there to put obstacles in the way of me loving others?

What does God think of all the conflict that is caused by religious dogmatism about what he is like?  Does he simply want us to get on with loving Him, and loving our neighbour as ourselves?

Grace and love to you all.

The End of Evolution

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Living things are amazingly complex and refined organisms.  Contained within our skin are muscles, organs, a nervous system, a circulatory system, an immune system, a digestive system, a reproductive system, a repair system, a growth system, and perhaps the most complex of all, a brain.

We are amazed and baffled by the latest smartphones and tablets, yet they are incredibly primitive compared with the brain.  Research has shown that there are more switches in a single brain than in the entire internet!  (http://www.cnet.com/news/human-brain-has-more-switches-than-all-computers-on-earth/ )

Yet all the complexity of the human body grows from a single cell.

One cell divides into two, then four, then eight.  On and on, dividing, specialising, growing and dying in a precise order to gradually construct the fully grown human being.  And the developing body self-programs the control systems and brain in a robust and repeatable process.

How can such a robust process happen?  Where are the instructions to tell the cells what to do?  Is it in the DNA?

There are 3 billion base pairs in human DNA.  Is it really possible that all the information necessary to grow and operate fifty trillion different cells over the entire lifespan of a human is fully encoded in the DNA of the original single cell?  Even if we used one base pair to define the position of each cell we are 10,000 times too short of information carrying capacity in the DNA.

But it’s worse than that.  In the DNA base pair system of numbering the letters CAGT are equivalent to numbers in base 4.  In base 10, the number fifty trillion (50,000,000,000,000) uses eleven characters, but in base 4 we would need 23 characters.  Our 3,000,000,000 DNA base pairs can only now specify 150,000,000 positions – 300,000 times less than we need just to define the position of each cell.

In addition to the position and type of cell, we are asking the DNA to carry the information to define the construction sequence and to program all of our behaviour patterns, our “operating system.”

What are the chances of that? Yet it happens.  Humans grow from a single cell every day.  Billions of us.

This sort of mathematics is often applied to the beginning of life, and show that the odds of forming even the simplest protein by chance are like looking for a single molecule in the whole mass of the earth. Yet it happened.

And how likely is the evolutionary process?  In their book The Origins of Life the authors John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry identify a number of what they call “Major Transitions” without which we would not exist such as:

  • From replicating molecules to populations of molecules in compartments
  • From independent replicators to chromosomes
  • From RNA as gene and enzyme to DNA as gene and protein as enzyme
  • From bacterial cells (prokaryotes) to cells with nuclei and organelles (eukaryotes)
  • From asexual clones to sexual populations
  • From single-celled organisms to animals, plants and fungi

What are the chances of that?  Yet it happened.

Here is a summary of the history of the earth and life on earth:

13.8 billion years ago: universe created

13.5 billion years ago: first stars form

5 billion years ago: the Sun forms, perhaps as a second or third generation star.

4.5 billion years ago: The earth formed as a molten mass. For the next 700 million years it was probably bombarded by large objects, and the energy of the collisions probably kept the earth molten up until…

3.8 billion years ago: earth crust solidified. Manufacture of pre-biotic chemicals needed for the life to exist

3.5 billion years ago: fossil evidence of cellular cyanobacteria.  .

1.5 billion years ago: first eukaryotic cells (cells with a nucleus) evident

1 billion years ago: first metaphytes (multicellular algae and higher plants)

500 million years ago: first metazoans (invertebrate and vertebrate animals)

1/4 million years ago: first homo-sapiens

Let’s put the evolutionary timeline into perspective of number of generations:

Bacteria typically reproduce every hour, so in the 3.5 billion years since cyanobacteria first emerged there have been about 35 trillion generations, although there seems to have been little evolutionary change in the 2 billion years before the first cells with a nucleus appeared.

Animals first emerged around 500 million years ago, and with a typical generation of 2 years implying around 250 million generations to move from the first animals to one with all of the complexity that we see in a human.

Against this backdrop, the evolutionary process has been incredibly fast; remember the extremely complex product that it has developed.  Yet it happened.

There are those who claim that all this happened as a result of sheer luck.

There are others for whom the following text seems to better describe things:

You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvellous—how well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.

For me, the findings of science hint strongly at a God who is continuously engaged in sustaining and interacting with the universe and life that he brought into being.  I find this fully consistent with the God that is revealed through a reasoned understanding of the Bible and demonstrated through the life of Christ.  I accept that it is not indisputably demonstrated, but I find the evidence sufficiently convincing to give my life as a result.

These issues are explored more fully in The Big Picture

See also:

https://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/evolution/

https://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/if-evolution-is-true/

https://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/information-dna-and-evolution/

 

 

What does it all mean? (from Eric Hatfield (aka unkleE) )

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I have a lot of time and respect for this man.  Here is his story:

http://www.is-there-a-god.info/blog/life/what-does-it-all-mean/

War, religion, God, and why I write

/ Minimalist Christian / 3 Comments

I remember a discussion soon after I became a Christian where I was asked “so what about all the other religions?”  My reply was that they were simply mistaken.  I think the remark was taken to be rather arrogant.

I read the news today. I see the conflict, anger and fear; fighting between Moslems of different sects.  I see forced imposition of religious dogma; conversion to another religion punishable by death.  We all know that this is not as it should be. And I am reminded of my reply.

Reason and evidence tells me there is a God, and my whole being tells me that love is our ultimate purpose.  And when I find that love underpins and is at the heart of Jesus teaching I begin to see how it all fits together; how we are meant to be.

If I were God and someone from another religion was praying to me, I would not ignore them because they think I have a different name, I would not condemn them because they don’t understand my intentions for them.  I would be saddened that they are misled, I would try to teach them, and I would restrain some of their actions, but I would still love them.

As a mere human trying to follow God’s purpose, I don’t hate the Muslims, or even the Westborough Baptists, but I believe they are misled and mistaken.  I hate what they do, and I want them to stop.  I want them to understand the truth, and find their real purpose.  I want that for everyone.

If we all really understood Christ’s teaching, if we really loved God with all our heart, and loved our neighbour as ourselves, if we really were ready to forgive others and restore broken relationships we know that the world would be a better place.

That is why I write.  That is why I follow Christ.  That is my purpose.

What is yours?

“A good robot is hard to find”

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I came across this article, and it reminded me how amazing the animal world is, and in particular human beings.  It only took  250 million generations since the first fossil evidence of animals to evolve a human, and each one is built from a single fertilised egg.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9249079/A_good_robot_is_hard_to_find_or_build?pageNumber=1

 

Painful lessons on worship, thanks to Bach

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It had been a busy period approaching Easter, but Good Friday had arrived with the promise of a short break.  We decided to start the weekend with a treat – to listen to St Matthew’s Passion by Bach in Coventry Cathedral.  An amazing piece of music that has formed an act of worship for many people over hundreds of years, we were looking forward to it.  We shared a lift with friends, one of whom was performing in the choir.

I knew nothing of the piece, but was a little alarmed to hear that it lasted three hours – I know what cathedral chairs can be like, and I was feeling somewhat worn down by some stressful meetings at work.  We had well placed seats, although the gentleman who sat next to me wore ‘fragrance of smoker’, and I noticed when the music began that his breathing was rather loud.  I prepared myself to be ‘wowed’ by the wonderful music.

Fifteen minutes into the performance I realised that the music and I spoke different languages of worship.

Thirty minutes in and I prepared myself for the ordeal as I do for the discomfort of a long flight in cramped uncomfortable airline seats; try not to wriggle too much so as not to disturb others,  focus on trying to doze and calm oneself to patiently endure the flight, listen to some nice music through headphones – not something I could do here of course.

It was not an un-spiritual experience.  It reminded me that Christ had suffered intently on the cross, that it had gone dark for three hours, that he’d willingly submitted himself to the pain, but that it would not have been an enjoyable experience.  And finally, thank God, it was finished.

The friends that I went with loved it, talking excitedly about different parts of the performance and how moved they were by it.  I was emotionally exhausted and felt excluded from the party – there was nothing positive I could think of to say, and I didn’t want to spoil their enjoyment of the evening so I was silent.  It was working until over dinner one of them mentioned I’d been quiet and asked what I’d thought of it.  After a few moments silence someone else spared me with ‘not your cup of tea then’, and the evening moved on.

Having had time to reflect a little, there are some lessons to learn from the experience.

  • Even the most brilliant worship music will not appeal to everyone, and will drive some people away.  If you want to help everyone ‘worship’, then you need a variety of approaches (not all musical!)
  • It feels very lonely and friendless being in an environment where others are enthusing about a method of worship that leaves you cold.  You can be left feeling ‘what’s wrong with me?’, and spiritually drained.  Don’t ‘demand’ that everyone enthuses about what you find uplifting, and don’t judge them if they don’t ‘connect’.
  • If you are feeling low, then a worship event may not be the best remedy.  You may end up worse that when you began.
  • Even if you are experiencing something painful, there are lessons to learn from it.

I don’t regret going, but I don’t suppose I will quickly repeat the experience.  Nobody wants to be the spectre at the feast.

Direct from the San Francisco Book Review

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The Big Picture – An Honest Examination of God, Science and Purpose
By P D Hemsley
eLectio Publishing, $4.99, 266 pages, Format: eBook

A former atheist/agnostic who gave God a chance offers open-minded readers this work which is both ambitious in scope and credible in approach: //The Big Picture: An Honest Examination of God, Science, and Purpose//.  Polarizing subject matter such as God and science, evolution, and intelligent design are revisited with the goal of gently challenging entrenched thinking on both sides.

Hemsley, a Chartered Engineer, “has lived on both sides of the faith fence.” His book is comparable to a technical presentation designed for a general audience. It is highly organized with stated goals, evidence, and the author’s conclusions. Fluid, straightforward writing helps the reader progress through several chapters or conclusions dealing with faith, science, purpose and design, quantum physics, free will, reason, Jesus, and more. Even so, those with less of a scientific bent will need to exercise their concentration skills in the scientific sections.

The strength of this book lies in complexity and compatibility. The chapters “Science Describes an Incredible Universe” and “The Universe Exhibits Design and Purpose” make for fascinating reading, especially the subsection where “challenged by the complexity of the biological machinery” Hemsley explores how a modern-day designer would engineer a human being and how long it would take. Additionally, the author’s version of the Genesis creation account featuring the compatibility of scientific discoveries and God’s design is an interesting interpretation to consider.

No emotional appeals are made to the atheist, agnostic, hardcore creationist, or plain honest seeker for a change in his or her worldview. In the words of the author, a self-described Minimalist Christian: “Whether you agree with my conclusion or not, I hope that many of the myths that currently inhibit so many of us will have been weakened or dispelled. I hope that a step can be taken towards finding purpose and experiencing life in abundance.”

http://citybookreview.com/the-big-picture-an-honest-examination-of-god-science-and-purpose/

Click HERE to buy a copy.

Am I just a computer simulation?

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Research suggests that human brain has more switches than the entire internet.  Each of the 125 trillion synapses that connect our 200 billion brain cells appears to have perhaps 1000 molecular scale switches. (ref 1)

Some areas of our brain take the input from our nerve cells and begin to process them.  They pass through other processing areas that start to interpret the signals; this sequence of signals from an eye might show us that an object is moving for instance.  Other areas deal with hearing or touch or smell.  Most of these areas carry out their functions without imposing on our consciousness.  At the top level, our brain presents a model of our environment to our conscious self.  The conclusion of this would seem to be that we are living within a computer simulation: generated by our brains based on input from the senses around our bodies interacting with our environment.  The question is, are we interacting with the computer simulation or are we the simulation itself?

Back in 2001 the Nick Bostrom speculated that scientific knowledge and computer power would at some time in the future increase sufficiently to build a simulation of the human brain in a computer (ref 2).  That computer would also be able to build a sufficiently complete model of the universe that an individual simulated human brain would not be able to distinguish it from the real thing.  The model would include not only one simulated person, but many, so that each ‘person’ had the true ‘experience’ of interacting with other ‘people’.

He reasoned that since the people who created this simulation would be likely to run a number of simulations (like our kids run lots of ‘Sims’ scenarios)  “Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race.”

There are inherent assumptions that Bostom builds on:  that our consciousness and ‘me-ness’ are simply emerging characteristics of the complex computer circuitry within our brain, and that science and technology will continue to advance until we understand and can model the brain operation.  The reasoned conclusion is that if these assumptions are correct then you and I are simulated beings in a computer simulation.

If that is the case, then we might conclude that it is of little consequence to switch off a particular simulation, in the same way that we are quite happy to switch off our computer.

But what if an alternative view is correct, that ‘we’ are not the simulation itself?  What if there is something about us that is more than an emergent property of a highly complex computer? What if there is a ‘me’ that transcends the ‘matter’ that makes up the computer in my head?  What happens then if the computer is switched off?  Do I cease to exist, or do I simply cease to interact with this particular computer?

The answer to that question lies beyond science and technology. We will have to look elsewhere for guidance.

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References:

1) http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/human-brain-has-more-switches-than-all-computers-on-earth/

2) Are you living in a computer simulation? Philosophical Quarterly (2003) Vol. 53, No 211, pp.243-255. (First Version: 2001)) Nick Bostrom

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For more on this topic and others see The Big Picture- an honest examination of God, Science and Purpose

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Four steps of reason leading to a personal God

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As I begin this post, I ask myself “Am I deciding what to write?”  You might think that a strange question with an obvious answer, but if I were to have a materialist view of things then I would struggle to answer with a ‘yes’.  At the heart of the problem is the question of whether I have free will or not.  Am I able to exert any choice on any decision (such as what to write) or is my action simply a result of the state of the molecules in my brain at the particular time when I think I am making a choice?

If there is nothing but matter, and matter behaves according to strict laws then there is no scope for me, or you, to make a free choice about anything.  Holders of the materialist view have argued that those who believe in free will need to demonstrate a mechanism before free will can be accepted to exist.

I do not subscribe to that view of things.  A bumblebee flies even if I am unable to demonstrate the mechanism.

Other disagreements with such a view are subjective.  Whilst I recognise that many of my actions might indeed be simply as a result of my brain state at a given time, I identify situations where I stop myself behaving according to ‘habit’ and consciously choose to behave differently.

From a practical viewpoint, our whole society is built on the basis that we have free will.  If I have no free will to be able to choose how to behave, then what right has society to imprison me for murder?  I would have had no choice but to kill my neighbour – it would have been an action that simply resulted from the chemical configuration in my brain at the time.

So for all practical and from all subjective points of view, I accept that we have free will.

That is step one; that we have free will.

The fact that I can call an opinion subjective inherently means that there is an “I” that is choosing to have an opinion.  Similarly, I speak about personal experience which requires there to be a person.  My personal subjective view is that there is indeed an “I” who is considering the facts and deciding what to write.  Descartes’ famous statement “I think therefore I am” argues that the only thing I know is that there is an “I” who thinks, and therefore “I” must exist – even if everything else is just my imagination.

So step two is that there is an “I” who exists.

The next thing to consider is how I exist (with the proviso that my physical being might be a delusion – but I still exist).   I exist because I have the ability to exist; something is causing me to exist.  I am not causing myself to exist, it is something apart from me that is ensuring that I exist.  Some might call that something ‘the laws of physics’, but I shall choose here to call that something God.

That is step three.  There is something that sustains me (and everything else) that can be called God.

The final step is to ask whether it is reasonable to imagine that this something (God) could sustain an “I”, who has free-will (which must operate outside the laws of physics) without itself having an “I-ness” to it.  Can the physical properties of a human being, which are sustained by God, ‘create’ an “I-ness” that God does not have itself?  Can “I-ness” be dependent on the sustaining power of God and yet above and separate from God?  And if not, then the power that sustains us must also have an “I-ness” about it.

Step four: the power that sustains us has itself the characteristics of “I-ness”: it is a person God.

A Masterpiece of Engineering

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We think that we design pretty neat things these days.  We laugh at the man who said that the world would probably only need four or five computers.  Those of us who are old enough can remember when we did a sum on the newly invented pocket calculator that gave us the answer 0.7734, which said “hello” when we turned the calculator upside down.

But whilst researching my latest book I came across some pretty amazing statistics about a design that we all treat as commonplace – each and every human being.

Our 1.5kg brain comprises around 100 billion neurons, of 10,000 different types. Each neuron can have thousands of synapses (input connections from other neurons) and each synapse has perhaps a thousand molecular scale switches.  A single human brain is estimated to contain more switches than the entire internet.

Contained within our skin are around 650 muscles attached to over 200 bones, which vary in size from the femur in our thigh to the stirrup bone in the ear.  The muscle/bone combination is precise enough to paint a masterpiece, or to putt a golf ball twenty feet into a hole.

We have around 60,000 miles of veins and arteries and 1500 miles of pipes in our lungs.

Within our lymph nodes we have billions of B cells, each of which is different and each one defends against a particular very specific infection.

The list goes on – but you get the point.

Yet this whole complex organism is built from a single cell.

We begin as one single cell.  Within the cell is our DNA, the supposed blueprint for our manufacture.  We have a massive 3 billion base pairs (characters in the ‘code’) in our DNA. Yet there are around 50,000 billion different cells in the body.  Each cell is different, in function and in position – some nerve cells can be several feet long.  How can we imagine that there is enough information contained within our DNA to define our fully functioning body?

But we do start from just one cell.  And each cell only responds to the signals that cross the cell membrane.   As we develop, the cell is what it is as a result of its history – its ancestor cells.  And each of those cells only responded to the signals that crossed it’s membrane.  It’s like a massive pyramid, built the wrong way up – with the apex at the bottom.  The process is incredibly robust.  Look at identical twins.  Most of their development is as separate human beings and yet the final ‘product’ is identical.

A human being is truly a masterpiece of engineering.

Is it reasonable to state with certainty that this happened by chance?  Is it reasonable to assert that the properties of the sub-atomic particles in the universe are such that they behave in precisely the right way to manufacture you or I from a single cell by sheer luck? Or would that be a blind leap of faith?

 

 

See also:

https://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/information-dna-and-evolution/

https://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/the-dna-enigma/