Is it real, or is it memorex?

Dear Readers:  I got THIS in the mail today, and although I won't comment on it one way or the other, this guy makes some valid points ......., and confirms what I said in my book "The Plain Truth About God" that nothing is black and white!

Dear Allan W Janssen:

 

 The bloody battle between religion and science is at a fever pitch these days.

 

Did God create the universe or are we here because of some accidental explosion of stardust? 

 

In one corner you have Richard Dawkins and his breed of fervent atheists. They contend religion is a primitive coping mechanism. Science has all but rendered it obsolete.

 

In the other, you have Ken Ham and the young earth creationists whose literal interpretation of scripture doesn’t allow an inch of poetic license on the part of the divinely inspired authors.

 

The atheists contend that life is a “happy chemical accident.” It just-so-happened to contain all the right materials and innumerable cosmic machinations to create a planet abundant with life that, despite all our valiant efforts, we cannot find anywhere else. We cannot locate any comparable example in nature. All this happened with no intention.

 

The YEC crowd holds that Genesis is a literal documentation of creation. That God created the universe in under a week; and simultaneously permitted an illusory body of evidence that only appeared to make the world look much older than its actual age of 6,000 years. YECs encourage us to ignore widely accepted evidence.

 

This is not a debate that lends itself to compromise. 

 

So people are fooled into thinking they have to choose between religion and science.

 

But is that really the case? Have the frontiers of science and biology trampled the pages of scripture?

 

Well, what if…

 

What if this was a false dichotomy?

 

What if evolution isn’t a “lie of Satan”? What if the real lie is the illusion that there’s something to fight about in the first place?

 

What if ALL of the discoveries in the last hundred years in Biology and Origins of life not only mean that religious belief scientific inquiry are not mutually exclusive but actually suggest a creator? 

 

You may not realize this but biblical fundamentalism is actually a relatively new construct. It wasn’t until the 19th century that Christians adopted genesis as a hard literal scientific account of creation.

 

In fact, 900 of the last 1000 years Christian thinkers were on the vanguard of scientific discovery. These men of faith knew that Genesis and the bible as a whole was a book of *truth*, not necessarily “ scientific facts”.

 

That being said, the Bible is congruent with science-based observable data.

 

If you can accept what Christian thinkers like Kepler, Descartes, and Newton knew, than you’ll discover: everything we continue to learn about biology and origins actually aligns remarkably well with Genesis’ version…

 

…as a poetic account of natural history.

 

Consider 3 ideas widely accepted in the Scientific Community:

 

1. The Big Bang: In 1927 a Belgian Priest Georges Lemaître, drawing from an array of empirical evidence, suggests that the universe had a beginning. That at a finite period in the past --some 13.8 billion years ago-- the universe emerged from an extremely hot dense state expanding and cooling to a point that supported life. --A moment of singularity when the universe came into existence. 

 

2. Life Began in Water: Once the earth cooled enough to support life, Volcanoes spouted out gases rich in material necessary for life into bodies of water. Up to about 400 million years ago we know that living organisms were confined to water. Before that ponds *teemed* with eukaryotes and single-celled prokaryotes before that.

 

3. The Cambrian Explosion: For hundreds of millions of years, life on earth composed primarily of microorganisms (algae, bacteria, etc) until a rapid evolutionary phase occurring 540 million years ago resulted in an explosion of animal diversity resembling the life we see today from seemingly nowhere.

 

Compare those ideas with Genesis. Is there really a contradiction?

 

Now, if we had to make obtuse, complex inferences in order to make the Genesis account fit, we’d have a big problem. 

 

But, given a few elegant assumptions, I’d be hard pressed to find any other ancient text, scripture, or religious tradition whose creation story comes as consistent with the prevailing theories and empirical evidence.

 

Early in the series, I talked about truth. 

 

Somehow this generation has lost respect for truth. Instead we decide our position beforehand and ignore facts that run counter to them. 

 

“The God of the Gaps” position holds that belief in God is used to explain various unknowns in the universe.

 

The atheist take on that is: 

 

The more we learn about the universe and the cosmos; the less can be attributed to the “Flying Spaghetti Monster”… 

 

…And the more irrelevant God and religion becomes.

 

This is how most atheists see Christianity. Sadly, Christians have bought into this lie.

 

They see the concept of evolution and any observable evidence as a threat to God. If we all accept that we came from monkeys, well, the whole foundation of Judeo-Christianity crumbles.

 

But what if the exact opposite is the case?

 

What if continual advances in scientific knowledge are coaxing us towards the Divine? 

 

Remember those wide words from C.S Lewis, 

 

“You don’t need to defend a lion, you just need to let him out of his cage”

 

Atheists and naturalists would have you believe that the verdict is in: Science has all but proven “God Is Dead”. 

 

That is far from the case. 

www.cosmicfingerprints.com