They may not be white Europeans, and they may have done nothing to provoke the attack, but is it any less horrific? Can the world do nothing to help? Let us at least show that we care: #jesuisnigerian
http://www.vox.com/2015/1/10/7525199/nigeria-boko-haram-attack
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.
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:
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/
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/
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.
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/
St Paul asked the rhetorical question “Well then, should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more of his wonderful grace?” He then went on to answer with complicated and metaphorical language about being buried with Christ through baptism. But I read this just after reading a facebook post from someone I care about behaving in a way that frankly won’t bring them happiness, and is simply satisfying their lustful urges. Looking at how I felt puts a new and simpler perspective on the question.
Let’s take it as read that God is love, and that he loves each one of us deeply. We also need to understand that sin harms us deeply. It may satisfy an immediate urge, but it harms us. In the same way that it saddens me to see those I love harming themselves, it must sadden God so much more to see us harming ourselves. Yet God still loves us, and in the same way that I still care about the person above, he cares about us. I will not reject that person, and God will not reject us. But it saddens Him so much that he was prepared to see Jesus tortured and killed on the cross to try to get through to us.
So if St Paul’s language seems confusing, just put yourself in God’s place and imagine how you would feel seeing your beloved son or daughter self-harming. You would long for them to give up their life of sin, and return to your loving arms. If they wanted to make a fresh start, you would do whatever it takes to wipe their slate clean. And that is just what God has done for us.
That’s why we shouldn’t keep on sinning; it causes God more pain and sadness and it does us no good either.
Simple.
“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
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.
The description of this program on iPlayer is “Archaeologist Richard Miles presents a series charting the history of the breakthroughs and watersheds in our long quest to understand our ancient past. He begins by going back 2,000 years to explore how archaeology began by trying to prove a biblical truth – a quest that soon got archaeologists into dangerous water.”
Unfortunately the tone and style of presentation of the program was similar to the description. The program frequently asserts that there is conflict between Archaeology and Biblical truth, and implies that Archaeology has proved the Bible to be wrong. The church is presented as a dogma bound institution that can only consider that everything in the Bible is to be taken literally. The church’s only contact with scientific methods was to use them to show that the world was created a few thousand years ago. Isn’t he aware that different parts of the Bible are written in different genre’s? Would he think that if archaeology could prove that there wasn’t a good Samaritan then that must show that Jesus was lying when he told the parable? Does he think that Christians really believe that the Genesis account is to be taken literally? As far back as the early fifth century St Augustine was forthright in his criticism of literal interpretation of Genesis.
The presenter, Dr Miles, frequently implies that archaeologists were ‘in dangerous water’ by thinking – thinking is something that is presumably not allowed by the church. Doesn’t he know that many of the greatest minds have been and continue to be Christians? Even the greatest secular scientists realize that questions of God are not trivial.
Dr Miles appears dismissive of the approach of looking for evidence to support a theory (Empress Helena seeking for evidence of Jesus’ crucifixion) – isn’t he aware that this is precisely the scientific method – build a large Hadron collider to look for a Higgs bosun for instance?
Dr Miles seems far happier to find something and then simply guess what it might mean. He appeared disappointed that the speculations of John Frayre (sp?) who ‘instinctively knew’ that the triangular objects had been made by human hand were not immediately adopted.
So for me, the undercurrent of generating a false conflict between God and Archaeology/Science, and the implied rejection of ‘belief’ spoilt what could otherwise have been an interesting and enjoyable program. I am disappointed that the BBC feel the need to generate some sort of conflict or controversy in so much of their programming.
Related posts:
https://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/an-argument-for-and-definition-of-god/
https://philhemsley.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/how-far-should-we-trust-scientific-prediction/
Thoughts from a Minimalist Christian 