So I shall celebrate this Birthday with prayer and meditation. I will come back from the daily grind to contemplate my reason for being here and what ever job I should be doing while I am. I don’t have all the answers, but I have to believe in something. I shall believe in a God, and that when this body of meat and bones runs its course, I hope I am accepted as one of his.
When you go through a year that’s been as crazy as this one, it’s good to know that there’s more to this life than viruses, and stocks, and elections and fraud, etc. While Thanksgiving is my favorite Holiday because we’re forced to slow down and take a day to say thank you, Christmas is a much more spiritual event for me.
You know the old adage that says never talk politics or religion, right? Well I have a habit of both and no, I’m not sorry. This year it’s been impossible to not talk politics, as it’s been in our faces 24/7 for months now. In fact, it’s still going on and will be for the next months. But not so much the religious or “spiritual” side of things. Unless you tune in Sunday morning to any one of the hundreds of Church services, God doesn’t make it to TV much.
Judging by the types of Emails I get, it seems most people have a belief in God and I think that’s a tremendous thing. I simply cannot for the life of me, understand folks that truly believe in Darwinism, and that we somehow evolved out a muck pile.
So this coming week, “X” amount of people around the world will celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, God’s son. This is no normal holiday, this reaches down into the inner core of who we are, why are we here and where’d we come from. For me, where Thanksgiving is the Holiday that makes me slow down and say thank you for all the good things, Christmas is the Holiday that makes me slow down and say “hey Bob, this thing we call life, isn’t just about here and now.” How true.
I enjoy a good debate, and there’s no better people to debate than those who believe life began in a tidal pool of primordial muck, the evolutionists. This is where the PH was perfect, the temperature was perfect, the exact ratio of chemicals was perfect, the “spark” was perfect, and “boom” a creature was born. Sorry, I don’t buy it, and yes I know your theory says it took millions upon millions of years. So what?
Let’s say it did take billions of years for everything to come together. After billions of years absolutely everything lined up perfectly and somehow that first living cell/creature was “born.” Okay fine, let’s go with it. How did it know it had to eat to continue life? Did it know it was hungry? And what did it eat? The same chemicals that formed it? And considering this was a once in a billion year happening, am I to believe the temperatures remained perfect, it’s food abundant and it survived for more than a day?
Then if it did that, against odds beyond comprehension, somehow, some way, it figured out how to multiply itself? To expand? Really? To this day has the creation of a living cell, or even a metabolizing, reproducing molecule, been replicated in the laboratory? No, it has not. In the finest laboratories in the greatest hospitals with Doctors of world renown, we can’t build one single living creature. But they say it happened in a soup, in a tidal pool by accidental alignment of chemicals. Right.
When people ask me why I believe in God, I have one word. Complexity. When corresponding with my friend Fred, this topic grounds us both. Complexity and intricacy.
Everywhere in the living world one sees intricacy wrapped in intricacy wrapped in intricacy. At some point the sane have to say, “This didn’t just happen. Something is going on that I don’t understand.” But an evolutionist cannot say that there is anything he can’t understand, only that there are things he doesn’t yet understand.
Read a textbook of embryology. You start with a barely-visible zygote which, (we are told) guided by nothing but the laws of chemistry, unerringly reacts with ambient chemicals to build, over nine months, an incomprehensibly complex thing we call “a baby.” Cells migrate here, migrate there, modify themselves or are modified to form multitudinous organs, each of them phenomenally complex, all of this happening chemically and flawlessly on autopilot. We are accustomed to this, and so think it makes sense. The usual always seems reasonable. I don’t think it is. It simply isn’t possible, being that it is a wild frontal assault on Murphy’s Law.
The foregoing is only the beginning of complexity. The many organs that formed effortlessly in utero are as bafflingly elaborate as cells themselves. Consider (and this is a much-simplified description of) the parts of the eye: The globe of three layers, sclera, choroid, and retina. Cornea of six layers, epithelium, Bowman’s membrane, substantia propria, Dua’s layer, Descemet’s membrane, endothelium.
Retina of ten layers. Lens consisting of anterior and posterior capsule and contained proteinaceous goop. The lens is held by delicate suspensory ligaments inside the ciliary body, a muscular doughnut that changes the shape of lens so as to focus. An iris of radial and circumferential fibers enervated competitively by the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems in opposition. A pump to circulate the aqueous humor. On and on and on. And equally on and on for all the other organs, which last for seventy years + , repairing themselves when damaged.
I could so much “go on” with this. The complexity of what we take for granted, such as “seeing” is a miracle beyond human thought. All that above is just the physics of the eye. But then to take that light photon, turn it into a chemical reaction via ion channels, etc and ultimately have it end up as an image in your brain takes no less than 80 perfectly precise chemical interactions, all done seamlessly. In picoseconds.
Yet I’m told it just happened. Sorry unbelievers, I shall not, will not and can not believe any of this just happened. So if it didn’t just happen, someone built it. That someone is what I consider God.
In the Christian book, that very God, sent his son to earth to try and show us heathens how to live. He was killed for his efforts. Nice folks we have here on this planet, no? Torture and kill an innocent peaceful man. No wonder we need saving.
So I shall celebrate this Birthday with prayer and meditation. I will come back from the daily grind to contemplate my reason for being here and what ever job I should be doing while I am. I don’t have all the answers, but I have to believe in something. I shall believe in a God, and that when this body of meat and bones runs its course, I hope I am accepted as one of his.
Merry Christmas all, please enjoy it as best you can with the Covid problems out there. Remember the reason for the season and I hope you all find a way to get closer to your creator.