Happy Teusday everyone, this is Val Campbell and welcome to another blog post! This entry investigates the question “What Is God?” and will be shared in several parts.
The second segment is an exploration of how Fath and Religion helps to solve problems.
I hope you enjoy this conversation and again, as always, please feel free to engage in the debate and discussion, whether you agree with me or not!
Faith and Religion
I am a person of faith. Being a faithful person simply means that even though I can’t understand or prove every aspect of something I believe in, I have arrived at a point where I will operate within, and accept, something as truth. I have often retold the story of when I was in college as a passionate biology student and found that my professors were not scientists, they were priests in the religion of secular humanism. I’m not certain a casual reader of those words can fathom my disappointment. The specific event was when it dawned on me that Darwinian Evolution, as it was presented as the origin of species, was mathematically impossible.
If you understand that the entire concept relies on random errors being beneficial, and that those mutations can accumulate without becoming extinguished through time, until another random mutation (an error) happens, then those two mutations also fail to be extinguished by nature, and over a billion years, untold billions of those mutations resulted in approximately one hundred million different species of plants and animals.
The mathematical improbability of that is so astronomical that a human being can’t hold the number in our head. All of that is explained by the belief that given enough time, all of it happened. There is one problem with that. Time is not the friend of random error, it works the other way.
Imagine the incredible complexity of one mammal species, humans for instance. Think about our eyes and how complex they are. Our hearing, skin, organs, reproductive system, being able to walk and talk. Think about how complex it is for a two humans to walk down a hallway and pass each other without colliding. Now think about developing one hundred million different species randomly.
Think of it this way. Let’s say you have 100 decks of cards. That is 5200 cards. If you shuffle them completely, then begin laying them out on a table. What are the odds that you will lay out 5200 cards in sequence?
I will answer that by explaining that dealing only one deck of cards in perfect order would happen once in the number one followed by 68 zeros times. The earth hasn’t been here long enough to even develop one species by random.
My point is that when I approached my college professors with the dilemma that math didn’t support what they were teaching, they admitted the issue and told me it was what they believed happened.
Belief in the impossible seemed to me to be more of a leap of faith than did a belief that some entity designed and created it. I accepted that even though I could not understand it, as long as I was going to accept something by faith, God made more sense.
As I explored that idea, I came across an argument in favor of Christianity, or perhaps I should say, in Christ. I found the evidence to be compelling, and while I despair of what humans have done to the faith, I have never found a reason to doubt that Jesus of Nazareth was who he claimed to be.
Religion isn’t the same thing as faith, although the two words are often conjoined. While faith is personal, religion is the creation of a systematic organization that attempts to regulate and conform people to a structure that is thought to bring them to God. The issue with religion, as with all governments, is that it is noble in concept but inevitably corrupt in practice. I often struggle with the way humans have twisted what God has presented to us; turning something inherently righteous into wickedness
I hope you enjoyed the blog, see you in Part 3. By tomorrow.