The wonder of life: a slipped disc can heal itself!

July 16, 2025 / Minimalist Christian / Leave a comment

I have just about recovered from damaging my back twice in succession. Two lots of 6 weeks out of action and on constant painkillers has not been fun. These days one expects that the doctors will just be able to fix stuff, but the ‘treatment’ available was basically take painkillers and when it’s feeling well enough do some exercises to strengthen it.

So it was down to me, or at least my body to fix itself. Although I don’t think I had a slipped disc, with nothing much to do I spent some time on the internet to understand more about back problems and found that “The body’s defense mechanism can spontaneously retract, shrink, or eliminate disc herniation.” https://www.spine-health.com/blog/can-herniated-discs-heal-their-own

Just let that sink in for a moment.

If my car has a worn joint, there is no way that it can heal itself.

If a computer program has a fault there is no way it can heal itself.

There is nothing that I personally can do to cause my back to heal. It is ‘simply’ that my body has the ability to heal itself. And if you look at how our bodies heal themselves, and how our immune systems work you will be astounded by the complexity of the processes.

Now I don’t want to question the process of evolution, but it is beyond me (or I believe beyond anyone) to explain how a completely unguided or undesigned process would lead to a mechanism within the body to heal a slipped disc.

And even if that’s not a challenge enough, isn’t it astonishing that the fabric of the universe; the raw elements (Hydrogen, Carbon, Oxygen etc) can combine together to create a living organism that contains within it the power to heal itself of a slipped disc?

We take these things for granted every day and grumble when our bodies don’t function as ‘normal’. Isn’t it more appropriate to take a step back and let the wonder of what our bodies do do just sink in? And maybe to thank the creator of the universe for the amazing gift of our lives?

Have a blessed day.

How should we respond to climate change? – A Christian perspective

July 26, 2019 / Minimalist Christian / 1 Comment

The earth’s climate has seen dramatic change. Four and a half billion years ago, the earth was formed. Its atmosphere had massively high levels of carbon dioxide, and there was very little oxygen. Miraculously, life originated in this extremely hostile environment, and for the next one and a half billion years or so the cyanobacteria began cleaning up the atmosphere and enriching it with oxygen and allowing the formation of the protective ozone layer.

Over the next two billion years the beautifully designed process of evolution took those earliest forms of life and developed them into the staggering array of life that we take so readily for granted today. Darwin hinted at the beauty of the process in the final paragraph of his book “the origin of species” when he wrote “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

So it is clear that man-made climate change will not destroy the planet, nor will it extinguish life. But it will disrupt the extremely finely balanced ecosystem that sustains the human race. That disruption will enlarge areas of local extinction of humans (desert regions), and in the extreme the whole planet could become unsuitable for human life. Whilst wealthy countries are able to create local ‘microclimates’ with technology, for example air conditioning, people sentenced to live in the ‘natural’ local climate will inevitably suffer and may face extinction. We already see an increase in suffering from natural disasters such as the cyclone Idai, and other increasingly destructive climactic events.

Greater parts of the world will become uninhabitable not just for humans, but for the cornucopia of other species who thrive in the environment that spawned us. New species will emerge, but many of our present ‘friends’ will disappear.

The first book of the Bible describes how we were given the world to look after. It is clear from the description above that if we don’t look after it then it will not be taken away from us, but we will be taken away from it. This is reminiscent of the description of Adam and Eve being taken away from the Garden of Eden: the garden still thrives, but they were no longer in it.

God allows us to do things that harm us. He doesn’t want us to, but he allows it. Such action is called sin. The basis of the Old Testament law was that God gave us rules that would bring us wellbeing, but our selfishness leads us to choose ways that harm ourselves and others. Greed, lust, envy, and all the ‘sins’ damage both us and our neighbour. Climate change is damaging to us and to our neighbour, and so the actions that leads to climate change are ‘sin’. God permits us to damage the planet that sustains us, but it is not His will. And disobeying the will of God is sin. It is not good for us to do it!

There is not space here to fully discuss how we, through our actions are hurting God themselves, but we might empathise by imagining how we would feel if after giving a loved one a beautiful gift – perhaps a bunch of flowers, we see them slowly trashing it, picking off one petal at a time.

So, how should we, as Christians, respond to the challenge of climate change?

First of all, we must recognise that it is real! (see for instance https://climate.nasa.gov/effects/)

Climate change is not the sin, but the consequence of our sin. We need to reflect on what sins are the root cause of climate change. Greed, selfishness, gluttony, envy will be high on our list, but a thorough examination of our lifestyle (in the context of and comparison with the other seven and a half billion people on the plant) must bring insight.

We then need to ‘repent of our sins and turn to God’. There is surely enough evidence that we know that we are sinning, but we need to let the evidence sink into our hearts and truly convict us before we can honestly repent. Until we reach that state then we might feel a little guilty but we will not have the power that comes from true repentance. We need to be so convicted that we get on our knees, confess, and ask for forgiveness.

We must work with God to eliminate our sinful behaviour. We will need to be bold, counter-cultural and outrageously attractive in our approach. We are Christ’s representatives, and our response has to mirror his character. And we must encourage our brothers and sisters to do the same. Not only must we turn from our damaging practices, but we must do our utmost to relieve the suffering of those whose homes and livelihoods are ruined by the changing climate. A radical change in our lifestyle must include loosening our grip on our wallets.

For example, we need to ask ourselves why we need to go to America, or China, or Australia for our holidays, for a speaking engagement, or for work. 99% of the world’s population cannot afford these luxuries – and yet many are closer to God than we are. http://www.globalrichlist.com/

We have to challenge every decision of where we spend our money. Should we always buy the cheapest, or should our buying decisions be made to minimise planetary damage?

We can make reparation for the damage caused by our personal sin. We can ‘offset’ our carbon emissions, for example “Climate Stewards helps you to offset unavoidable carbon emissions by supporting community forestry, water filter and cookstove projects in the developing world”. Some are beginning to do this for holidays or the odd long haul flight, but that is surely just lip-service. Should we not examine our carbon emissions over our lifetime and offset them? (see https://www.climatestewards.org/) At only £20 a tonne, many of us are in the privileged financial position to be able to do that. There is real potential for tree planting projects to ‘buy some time’: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/planting-trees-could-buy-more-time-fight-climate-change-thought. And churches can do the same, committing to offset past energy usage and adding carbon offset as a statutory spend each year. It is much easier if we all make the commitment together. Leadership from our Bishops can help here.

Those of us who live comfortably in brick houses in rural England can send financial assistance to those whose pole and dagga houses are swept away by floods or typhoon. (see https://www.christianaid.org.uk/emergencies/south-asia-floods-appeal) As James says: “Suppose you see a brother or sister who has no food or clothing, and you say, ‘Good-bye and have a good day; stay warm and eat well’—but then you don’t give that person any food or clothing. What good does that do? So you see, faith by itself isn’t enough. Unless it produces good deeds, it is dead and useless.” Communication is so good that we see our ‘brother or sister who has no food or clothing’ daily on our TV’s or computer screens.

We will of course fail to live up to our aspirations, but we can try. And when we fail, God’s grace will free us to try again.

And finally a thought about our legacy. The younger generation are worried. Environmental issues are at the top of their concerns. And the younger generation tend not to know Christ. We have a wonderful opportunity to bring them hope, both for a world to live in and from a God who loves them. That is a far better legacy than bequeathing a scorching earth that is hardly able to sustain human life.

Let us be at the forefront of change, not dragging our feet but leading the way to a sustainable future.

The universe is so big and has been here so long …

March 8, 2019 / Minimalist Christian / Leave a comment

Big Bang was about 14 billion years ago; the universe is older and bigger than we can possibly imagine. Dinosaurs were on the earth for over a hundred million of years, a thousand times longer than the humans have been around. And looking at the population of the world today, as an individual among 9 billion people alive, In comparison with the totality of space and time, each individual is surely completely insignificant.

But… there is an alternative.

If God exists they must be bigger than all this, and older than all this and they must have had a reason to bring the universe into being and sustain it, and to wait while the stars and planets formed and reformed, life began and evolved, and mankind emerged and developed. And if, as many of us believe, they sent their son to teach us and to die for us then we move from being completely insignificant to enormously significant.

But perhaps it still seems an awful lot of effort for God, too much to believe perhaps. But think about the effort that we put in to the smallest of things used for enrich a very short period of time. Think of how much time, energy and space goes into making a simple gold ring with a diamond on it, and getting it to a shop so that someone can buy it to propose an engagement. Just compare the size of the gold and diamond mines with the end product – let alone all the work needed to refine, shape and manufacture the ring, and to transport it to the shop. We are pleased to do all that, God’s work just takes things to a bigger scale…

Excerpt from The Big Picture: “Am I Open Minded?”

January 26, 2019 / Minimalist Christian / Leave a comment

As we start out ask yourself the question, “Am I open minded, ready to follow where evidence leads, with no preconceptions?”

Now I’m sure you’ve answered “yes” because none of us would like to admit otherwise, but actually, it may be impossible to start any investigation without preconceptions. They are the motivation behind many investigations … the desire to obtain proof of what we already think about something.

Preconceptions are almost inherent in the scientific approach – we think of a theory, and then we investigate to test it. If we are honest, we will admit that we like our theories and feel good when they are proved right.

Perhaps there is one preconception that I will allow at this stage; that each one of us matters. I matter. You matter. Our friends and neighbours all matter. If we don’t matter then there is no point in anything and it’s best not to think any deeper. That road leads to despair.

If we are going to explore these questions fully we are going to have to consider questions of God, science, reason, history and more. We are going to have to include objective data and subjective experience; objectivity keeps us from being deluded but it is the subjective that really matters to us.

Even if we try to think about an issue with an open mind, we nevertheless carry many assumptions that we don’t realise. Speaking personally, my scientific education and engineering career have both instilled a basic assumption of materialism: the fabric of the universe is all there is. When people talk about a spiritual dimension, is it just another material dimension that we can’t see? And if there is a spiritual dimension, how can it interact with the physical universe? Or if there isn’t a separate spiritual dimension then where does God exist? These are not straightforward questions, but I’ve come to realise that they are valid. I have had to challenge a lot of what I took simply as common sense and to open my mind to new possibilities.

It can be difficult to refresh our way of thinking, particularly if we are surrounded by others who have a similar outlook to ourselves. In a recent discussion on European history with a university student he mentioned that such and such country was fascist. It led me to ask what it is that makes the people there fascist. Is it genetically programmed into each individual there? If you took any one of them and brought them up elsewhere would they be fascist? I think it likely that they wouldn’t. They are fascist because everyone around them is fascist. They are unconsciously trained to be fascists.

So what are we doing in our country? What are we training ourselves to think like? What assumptions do we hold, and are they valid? Books such as The Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake[i] challenge many of the assumptions of the day. He asks us to challenge our scientific dogmas, our blind assumptions. Even if we end up thinking the same as we did before, we have a more solid basis for our beliefs if we go through the process of challenging our assumptions.

Implications

Whenever anyone is presenting a case we might ask ourselves, “If I were to accept what is being presented and agree with the author, what would be the implications for me? How willing would I be to accept those implications? Do I need to understand the implications before I start?”

Many parents choose not to have their babies tested for Down’s syndrome because they would not be willing to accept a termination of the pregnancy and so feel that there is no point in knowing before the child is born. Others might need to understand all the implications before deciding; how accurate is the test, and what are the options available if the child tests positive? Still others might insist that they must have the test because they are not prepared to risk having a child with Down’s syndrome and would terminate the pregnancy if that were shown to be likely by the test.

This is a book that deals with questions of God. This may worry some people. If they were to be convinced that God is real they would have to become the sort of bigoted judgemental fanatic that represents the worst face of religion. They may think that they would need to join a religion and accept all that they are told without thinking, and be associated with all the religious atrocities of the past. Or that they will have to give up their Sunday morning lie-in and trot off to church with a bunch of hypocrites. If these thoughts resonate with you, take courage – it doesn’t have to be like that.

Fear

People can be frightened by the prospect of change, but often change is beneficial. For instance, when redundancies are announced, there is a lot of fear in the workforce. Some may have been in the same job for thirty years, and they simply don’t know anything else – how will they cope if they have to find another job? And yet being forced to change jobs can be a most liberating and life-changing experience. I recall hearing a report that those who remain behind after a round of redundancies are likely to be more stressed than those who have been made redundant. They are still in the same job, but with increased fear of losing it and still in fear of change, whereas those who have left are now busy rebuilding their new lives and careers. That’s not to say it’s easy to change, but a change in a job or a worldview can be very liberating.

Peer Pressure

Perhaps we don’t want to change our views because of what others might think of us. We’ve probably aired our opinions sufficiently to our friends that any major change would be an embarrassment. Or perhaps we live or work in a culture where there is only one accepted way of thinking. We might find that we have to live a double life, adopting one attitude at work and another in private. For instance, to progress a career as a scientist it is necessary to publish papers and learned articles. Such articles are subject to peer review. This process is in place to ensure that sound scientific information is published and that mistakes do not get propagated. But the process inherently risks that only those papers that conform to the present scientific way of thinking are published. If a scientist becomes too free thinking, then the peer review process may prevent his papers being published and his career may come to a grinding halt. Reputation is essential, and doing anything that might lose it is risky.

An ambitious scientist may be fearful of embracing religion. Religion allows that God might interfere with the workings of the world. That might mean that the universe is not completely predictable, which would seem to undermine the basis of all the work of science. Allowing the existence of God might mean that it will be impossible to have a complete scientific theory that predicts everything – which is challenging to anyone who invests their life in seeking it.

Similarly, in religious circles it can be damaging not only to one’s career but also to one’s life to challenge the current way of thinking. Men and women have been labelled heretics and have been burnt at the stake for holding different religious beliefs.

Religious people may have a deep fear of science. Apart from the vocal assertions made by some atheists that science has done away with God, there can be fear that science might undermine or even disprove certain traditions or beliefs that the given religion may hold dear, or even sacred. A religious man may have invested so much in his religion that he’s lost the desire, and maybe even the ability, to be open to learning that some of what he’s been taught is incorrect. Yet surely a truly godly man would be desperate to be corrected if he were misunderstanding God? In her book Awesome God, Sara Maitland encourages religious people to embrace what can be learned from science:

Start with “God exists” and everything we can learn will tell us more about God.[ii]

So returning to the question, “Am I open minded, ready to follow where evidence leads, with no preconceptions?” we can see that it is almost impossible not to have preconceptions or preconditions. A first step in challenging them is to consider how we came to believe them in the first place. How did we come to really know what we know?

[i] Rupert Sheldrake: The Science Delusion ISBN 978-1444727944

[ii] Sara Maitland: Awesome God: Creation, Commitment and Joy ISBN: 978-0281054190

Foreword to The Big Picture

January 21, 2019 / Minimalist Christian / Leave a comment

Scientific discovery has brought material benefits and physical comfort to mankind. The predictability of matter leads us to assume that it behaves according to fixed laws, and this belief has led engineers to develop tools and machinery to manipulate the environment, doctors to develop cures for many diseases, and farmers to grow crops with greatly increased yields. Many of the scourges of previous times have been overcome leading, in the Western world at least, to longer lifetimes and better health. However, this has also led to the belief that everything is predictable and controllable. If anything goes wrong (by which we mean it causes us distress or discomfort) then it must be fixable, and if it hasn’t been fixed it must be someone else’s fault.

Personal rights have grown, but personal responsibility has diminished. Laws to protect the weak have bred the belief that it is the state’s job and not our individual duty to help out those less fortunate than ourselves. Mechanisation that was supposed to give more leisure time has led to lost jobs and loss of purpose. Competition and the shrinking of the geographical world has meant that there is someone, somewhere who will work harder or longer hours than we do, and the pressure grows to produce more for less. The availability of loans means that goods can be obtained now if we promise to pay later. To pay the loan we need a job. Fear of job loss drives us to work longer hours and accept less pay. The purpose of life becomes to produce. The mechanism which fuels demand and production is the economy. The economy becomes the measure of the health of a nation.

Is that what it’s all about?

Is my value simply what I can produce?

Am I measured just by what I can earn?

If I retain the worldview that the economy is king then the implication is yes, but that doesn’t feel right. I want to be valued and loved as a person. I want a worldview that speaks to my heart and my mind and not just my wallet, and I want it to be based on sound thinking and evidence.

Science has brought great technological and medical benefits to mankind; cars, televisions, fridges, telephones, electricity and so on. But science has also brought guns and bullets, pollution, global drug trafficking and job losses. Science seems to dominate my life, telling me what I should or shouldn’t do to keep healthy, avoid risk and live longer, but it doesn’t tell me why I would want to live longer. Science doesn’t give any purpose to my life.

Religion offers purpose, but it too seems to want to control me and dominate me. Religion has been used as justification for many great atrocities: the Spanish Inquisition, child sacrifices, the Crusades. Religious people seem to want to tell me how to behave, and to judge and criticise me, claiming to represent the will of God.

I want to know the truth. I want to know what science can tell me about how the universe works, and perhaps where I came from. I want the benefits that science can bring, but not at the cost of becoming a slave to its dictates. I want to know why I am here, what my purpose in life is, or even if there is one. If there is a God I want to know what He thinks. I want the benefit of knowing that I have a purpose, but not at the cost of becoming a slave to rules from another human being.

And so I investigate, weigh up evidence in all forms and seek a holistic worldview that works. I have explored what we know from the physical and biological sciences, and I have researched historical evidence for God. I have tested what is actually known, and what is speculation, extrapolation or personal opinion and rhetoric.

This book presents my conclusions, and some of the evidence that brought me to draw them. I offer what I believe is a consistent, healthy and constructive worldview based on sound evidence. I’ve called it Minimalist Christianity. 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.

A contemporary Genesis

April 2, 2016 / Minimalist Christian / 3 Comments

One morning I felt the inspiration to write a modern version of the Genesis account of creation, incorporating and alluding to the scientific discoveries of recent times. I hope that nobody chooses to take offence:

Before the beginning of time and matter in our universe, there was God. Of his works other than our universe we know nothing, but of his works in this universe we have learned much through the gift of our intellect. Of all his purpose in our universe we can know only what he has chosen to reveal to us, and he has revealed that we were his purpose. One purpose alone or one purpose among many is not for us to know.

God chose to create this universe. He created time, and then he tore nothingness into matter and antimatter, and in that great explosion from nothing he caused there to be an excess of matter over antimatter. And he causes matter to interact with matter through invisible forces acting across nothingness. And ripples of that rending apart of nothing remain until this day for us to observe with wonder.

Since God knows his plans, he chooses to cause matter to behave in a consistent way. He allows the tiniest particles to behave in individually unpredictable ways, but in community he causes them to follow his chosen laws. In the presence of spirit, whether God’s own or that of humans or other spiritual beings, God allows his laws to be suspended. God continues to sustain and guide his creation, acting as and when he chooses and allowing individuals to choose how to act.

And so for billions of years, although years were yet to be invented, the universe unrolled according to the laws that God had chosen. Particles formed into atoms, atoms formed into great stars and stars drew together into galaxies. The first stars grew to such a size that the interaction between the matter and the forces caused great energy and the explosion of the stars, and in those explosions new atoms were formed. God was making the building blocks of life, the carbon and the oxygen atoms. Out of those explosions, and according to God’s laws of interaction new stars formed, and planets were formed around those stars.

One of those planets, the earth, had the right conditions for the next phase in God’s plan. The planet was at first a molten mass, bombarded from space by asteroids and meteors as the turmoil of the formation of the particular sun and galaxy subsided. A crust was formed on the molten mass, and a gaseous atmosphere formed above the crust. In that atmosphere and on the crust, the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms joined to form more complex short molecules. When the time was right, these short molecules formed into long chain molecules. These very special molecules continued to work according to the laws that God had chosen for the atoms and particles. The molecules had different purposes, some formed into cell membranes, some formed into little molecular machines, and some formed into very long instruction chains. And God caused them to be combined into what we today would call cells, and God had given them the mechanism to multiply in number.

To the first cells he gave the task of changing the atmosphere of the earth. Using the energy of the nearest star, the sun, the cells separated oxygen from carbon dioxide and pumped the oxygen into the atmosphere. For more than a billion years the cells carried out their task of preparing the atmosphere of the earth, getting ready for the more complex organisms that were next on his plan.

When conditions were right, the individual cells formed into groups or communities that were dependant on each other, where each cell in the group performed slightly different functions and so the new organism was able to both become larger but also to perform more complex functions. God gave the individual cells the means to evolve a mechanism that would carry the instructions for each cell in the group to perform its function, and to respond to the communications from other cells within the group. And so, multicellular organisms were formed.

The instructions embedded in each of these cells ran to billions of characters in length. The mechanisms of the cell and these instructions were both necessary for the cells to operate and grow, and to reproduce from generation to generation. God didn’t plan to make all organisms identical, so he designed ways and means of bringing variation to the offspring of the organisms. He allowed “random” variations due to inaccurate copying, and he caused deliberate mixing of the instructions in one organism with another, requiring separate organisms to come together in order to create the next generation. The organisms themselves thus had to live in partnership and community to survive.

So God had established a process of growing a wide diversity of organisms of increasing functionality that relied on each other to survive and thrive. Whilst each individual organism would be allowed to behave in an individual way, only those that were successful in progressing God’s plan survived and reproduced. God chose to allow a process of competition to develop the organisms as he wanted; a process which required individual capability and cooperation between individual cells within an organism, and between organisms of the same type. Through this phase of God’s plan he used the law of “survival of the fittest” to perfect each organism, and to select which organisms to perfect. The organisms didn’t know anything of right and wrong.

But that was not the end of God’s purpose, although it took billions of years to accomplish. His plans were greater than that, for there to be beings in his likeness; beings that would design and create, but more than that, beings that would know right from wrong, beings that would love, spiritual beings that would know and seek God himself.

So he selected one of the organisms and he planted his spirit in that organism and gave it an awareness of God himself, and he gave that organism the ability to know what is right and what is wrong, and he gave that organism the ability to choose to do what is right or what is wrong. That organism is mankind, the pinnacle of God’s creation.

You might not be ready to accept this new account. Certainly it is not literally correct, but maybe it is more relevant to today’s society in the same way that the original Genesis was relevant to the society of its day. It conveys that all of us are spiritual and material beings, willed by God as the culmination of a creative process of unimaginable complexity spanning billions of years, following the creation of time itself. Mankind: created with the opportunity to know God and to relate to him, but allowed the alternative of rejecting and ignoring him.

Excerpt from “The Big Picture – an honest examination of God, Science and Purpose”

A robust intellectual basis for Christianity is not enough.

January 16, 2015January 12, 2015 / Minimalist Christian / 5 Comments

I like to understand why things are like they are. As a child I was taught that science provides the answers that I needed.

When in later life I became a Christian I thought that there was a conflict between science and God, but for a while reconciled this with the idea that ‘God can do anything’. A simple idea, but science and faith was not an area that I really wanted to explore.

We are given the impression that ‘science knows’, but we just haven’t been told yet. About five years ago I decided to find out. What does science know? What does it still not know? Are there things it can never know? Taking everything into account, what story best fits all the facts, a godless universe or one with a God?

I adopted an analytical approach, but avoided the temptation to dig too deeply into details of each field. I just tried to understand the underlying principles sufficiently to see what they contribute to the big picture. I found that most people feel uncomfortable outside of their specialist field, that few seem willing to take the necessary overview.

Having read a couple of books like ‘The Edge of Evolution” by the Intelligent Design proponents I began thinking that it may be possible to prove God exists. But then I read secular books on the origins of life and realised that everyone accepts the remarkable unlikelihood of life but that it doesn’t provide irrefutable proof – there are alternative explanations such as the multiverse theory.

I needed to find out where the Bible came from; could I trust it, and if so, why? I researched the source of the NT documents in particular, and some of the gospel accounts that are excluded from the Bible (the Da Vinci code stuff). I realised that the gospel accounts are not trying to prove who Jesus was and what he did, but that they wouldn’t have been written if he hadn’t done some amazing things. The accounts are simply people trying to capture what happened for future generations. The Bible is not a spells book: “Do this and God will do that for you”.

I reached a number of conclusions about how to understand and respond to the big picture of what’s going on. Realising that everything requires a level of faith (including science of course), I suggest a response which recognises that many religious and scientific dogmas are unproven and unprovable – but unnecessary. I call the response “Minimalist Christianity”. I wrote up what I found in “The Big Picture”, found a publisher and then set about marketing my masterpiece.

There is a robust intellectual basis for Christianity, and I would commend it to others, but I recently realised that in exploring it I was falling into a bit of a trap. Because I have necessarily spent several years testing and probing, viewing things sceptically, I let my personal spiritual life become analytical too. My reasoning has shown that God exists, and that he must have a ‘personality’ and want to interact with each of us, but I have not really been responding to the real God – just developing an intellectual one.

We need to ‘get to know God’ as more than an idea; I need to follow my own advice! It is from the integrity of that relationship that the power to fulfil our purpose will flow. We need analysis to know that we can trust, but then we need to act on that trust to complete the experience. Having determined that the rock exists, we need to actively build the house of our life on it!

“Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock. Though the rain comes in torrents and the floodwaters rise and the winds beat against that house, it won’t collapse because it is built on bedrock.” Jesus circa 30AD

The End of Evolution

October 18, 2014 / Minimalist Christian / 2 Comments

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

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

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

“A good robot is hard to find”

June 18, 2014 / Minimalist Christian / Leave a comment

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

Direct from the San Francisco Book Review

April 2, 2014April 5, 2014 / Minimalist Christian / Leave a comment

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.