Existence of God

I think I might be a panentheist – I hope it’s catching!

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The ancient Celts knew a thing or two. They were not the wild fighters who the Sheriff of Nottingham brought in to drive Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood from his idyllic woodland village. They had a special understanding of the nature of things. According to “The Celtic Way” by Ian Bradley they held “a conviction that the presence of God was to be found throughout creation – in the physical elements of earth, rock and water, in plants trees and animals and in the wayward forces of wind and storm.”

Bradley goes on to say that “We are not in the world of pantheism here but in the much more subtle and suggestive realm of panentheism – the sense that God is found both within creation and outside it.”

Elsewhere I have written that God is ‘the laws of physics’ – it’s just another name for the thing which causes matter to behave in the way that it does. Without God/’the laws of physics’ there can be no matter – God and matter are not independent, and so matter is (part of) God. (see “Proof of God?”)

I have also noted that there are non-material things: love, justice, purpose etc. These must similarly be part of God – reflected in the Biblical passages which state that God is love. (see “An argument for, and definition of God”)

This understanding of the nature of God leads us to realise that you don’t need to go somewhere to meet God – he doesn’t live in church or a monastery – he is all around us, and within us, sustaining our physical bodies and our environment: “we are what we are through and within God”. (see “The God of Science”)

The Celts understood this. Not within the scientific context that I have described, but in the practical day-to-day knowledge of God. Perhaps we need to refresh our view and understanding of science to reflect this Celtic wisdom: science is simply the study of God!
There is no separate sacred / secular division, no God / nature division, no heaven / earth division; they are all part of God who is God of everything.

 

A robust intellectual basis for Christianity is not enough.

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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

“Here, there be dragons”

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Centuries ago many people used to live their entire lives within a few miles of where they were born. Occasionally travellers would pass through with tales of far-away places which held wonders, treasures and maybe ‘dragons’. But few would dare cross the borders surrounding their small world of familiarity.

Dragon-Linda_BlackWin24_JanssonNowadays many people again live their entire lives within a relatively small environment. Maybe it is not physical, since modern transportation puts the whole world within reach, but I’m speaking of relationships, culture and spirituality.

Our sphere of friends is gathered through encounters where we like to pass our time: work, the sports club, the toddler group or school, the pub. We meet like-minded people in comfortable environments and put down roots there. Occasional travellers pass through with tales of other lifestyles: we get peeps at them on the TV reality shows, a foreigner might join our band, or a tragedy might move us out of our comfortable world. But “few dare cross the borders of their small world of familiarity”, and most will lobby to maintain their personal utopia.

We understand how the world works through what we have learned through personal experience, the media and common sense.  With our Western worldview glasses we know such things as: the economy has to be healthy, everyone should be educated and democracy is the only system that works. And of course we should all have rights, to health, happiness and freedom, particularly freedom of speech. We seldom stop to question the basis on which we have decided that all of these ‘truths’ are correct. When we hear tales of other cultures we are fearful that they will invade our territory and bring unimaginable horrors and suffering.

But perhaps we are most fearful of uncharted spiritual seas. England used to be a Christian nation, although deeply divided between Protestant and Catholic, but has largely come to believe in Scientism; the religion that science can explain everything. It can be comforting to think that science can tell us why Grandma died, and to hope that in the future cancer will be conquered. Occasionally we will hear tales of a spiritual realm, something that is not simply made of ‘stuff’, and strangers will speak of God and tell us that we have a ‘soul’. A frequent response is to ignore such ramblings, or to accept that such things may be ‘okay’ for them, but I’m quite happy in my own ideas thank you very much.

Secretly, if we are bold enough to ask ourselves, we will admit that our small-world outlook is largely driven by fear. We are afraid that we will lose our basis for life, even if it doesn’t seem to be working too well for us at the moment. We would love to befriend those in different circles, experience different cultures, and reach a satisfying understanding of who we are spiritually; we yearn to find our soul and our purpose.

It is the beginning of a new year: 2015. Two thousand and fifteen years after a special baby was born. Who as a man spoke strange tales of a spiritual realm and a God. A man whose words gave us a rock to build our lives on. A man who willingly allowed himself to be crucified to show that death could not hold him – or us. A man who Christians call God. Perhaps it is time to take our courage in our hands and explore this strange new land? Many have gone there before, but few have returned with tales of dragons! Instead, they come back with stories of hope and fulfilled purpose; the promised land. Shall we go?

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/

 

 

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.

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.

Fear of science

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There are millions of people spending their working life pushing forward scientific knowledge.  The breadth of knowledge discovered by the hands of so many scientists is beyond anyone’s comprehension.  Pronouncements by the scientific community have become almost the word of God.  Nobody has the evidence to question them. And yet…. sometimes they just don’t seem right.  They make us uneasy.  We fear that scientists have overstepped their knowledge, and often rightly so. We must not be afraid to voice our concerns, see for example https://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2013/11/22/mitochondrial-donation-some-concerns/

With so much knowledge out there, and so many people working on science, many in society have come to believe that science will eventually be able to answer every question.  “Eventually we will know everything about how the universe works. Science will allow us to live forever.  Technology will reverse global warming.  We will finally leave earth and colonise the solar system and universe.  Maybe we will even learn to travel through time itself, and finally we will be able to meet the maker of it all and ask why he made such a mess of things….”

Of course, many of these ideas come from science fiction, but literature influences our culture and outlook.  All of the ideas above seem reasonable extrapolations of where we have got to, and are often reinforced by the fantasizing of high profile scientists. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1270531/Stephen-Hawking-backs-possibility-time-travel-millions-years-future.html

There is another group of people who have a different outlook. They believe that the literal explanation for everything that has happened, and prediction of everything that is going to happen in the future is written in a collection of books and manuscripts compiled from 2000-4000 years ago, called the Bible.  The first of these books describes how the world was created and populated with all the plants and animals as completely formed organisms. The whole process took just six days.  This literal interpretation of the book of Genesis will inevitably lead to a fear of science; “Will those millions of people prove my belief’s wrong?  Have I built my life on a lie?”

How can we overcome our fear of science?  How can we tame and control this beast, and stop it turning round and destroying us?

The only way to overcome our fears is to face them.  We need the courage to try to understand what science is and what it isn’t, what it can tell us and what it can’t.  We need to understand the assumptions behind all science.  We must not get lost in the detail, but we need to set the whole in context.  We need a guide.

Many of my posts on this blog are intended to help us think about scientific issues:

https://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/how-far-should-we-trust-scientific-prediction/

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

https://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/god-miracles-and-the-laws-of-physics/

and my book “The Big Picture” can equip the reader to begin to understand how to deal with science.  Reviewers seem to think it works:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/766354330

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/767596412

There are other resources that help understand how we might deal with science, and I refer to many in the book.  But I hope that my years of spare time researching of these big questions will be of benefit to others, if only as a starting point for further discovery.

As I mentioned above,  if we are afraid of science, the best thing to do is to confront our fears.  And it’s best to confront them with a friendly guide.

Related articles

 

Lord Kelvin and God

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From the BBC website:

Lord Kelvin believed science must be treated with reverence, as he explained:

“I have long felt that there was a general impression that the scientific world believes science has discovered ways of explaining all the facts of nature without adopting any definite belief in a Creator. I have never doubted that impression was utterly groundless.

“The more thoroughly I conduct scientific research, the more I believe science excludes atheism. If you think strongly enough you will be forced by science to the belief in God, which is the foundation of all religion.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/0/24535331

If, like Kelvin, you are as willing to explore the facts and consider your own opinion, you might like my recently released book “The Big Picture – an honest examination of God, Science and Purpose”

http://www.electiopublishing.com/index.php/bookstore#!/~/product/category=4758362&id=28794920

 

“The Big Picture” – an honest examination of God, science and purpose – OUT NOW

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“I recommend this book to all thinking people – we might just change the world.” 

“This book will definitely make you think and then think again. Hemsley did his research for this book, and I received many answers to questions I’ve pondered over the years.”

“it is a welcome relief to come across a book that presents such a broad and balanced overview”

“This book covers an considerable amount of territory in its 253 pages.”

The Big Picture is a much-needed book that allows the reader to consider the big questions of life without feeling bludgeoned to adopt the author’s opinion. The book explains basics of science, philosophy and religion in a straightforward manner.

It will encourage all those who want to live a good and purposeful life and would like a sound basis for doing so. Such readers may find a resonance with the teaching of Jesus and this book will explore whether we can trust what has been recorded in the gospel accounts, and whether the findings of science and a reasoned understanding of the Bible are consistent or contradictory.

Many books in the arena of science and faith are hostile and adversarial. The authors set up straw men of their opponent’s arguments, dismantle them and then preach their own arguments to their disciples. The author of The Big Picture recognises that there are intelligent atheists and intelligent believers, and that a case can always be made for whatever someone wants to believe. The reader is therefore treated with respect

ebook

paperback

Amazon UK

The Big Picture - cover

The Big Picture – an honest examination of God, Science and Purpose

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If you have wondered if science, faith and reason are compatible then this is a book for you.

The book explores how everything (including science) is based on faith of some sort.  It explains in understandable terms what science tells us (quantum physics, evolution, DNA, neuroscience etc), and what it can’t tell us, and presents some of the documentary and rational evidence for and basis of Christianity – useful if you want to base your outlook on information instead of propaganda.

The style is a combination of balanced data presentation and respectful discussion; you will not be brow-beaten into having to agree with the author!

Click on the book cover (right) to order your copy.