The penny will drop? Yeah, it dropped. I went from being raised Christian to thinking I was becoming more educated through the years by believing that humans evolved straight from ape-like primates, there was no God, the Creation story was used to explain the world by primitive minds, science started everything, the Bible was all folklore and hearsay, etc. Then, it occurred to me through personal life experience that I could not and was not able to do things on my own. I also learned that no matter how hard I tried I could not control life. It was apparent that I was using "free will" to the maximum and concurrently, "God's Will" was a useless idea to me. When I hit the brick wall for the gazillionth time, I figured I would do some research and reading myself. I would see if the New Testament had any clout, if Jesus was the Messiah, if end times were happening or is it the natural process of the Earth, living and dying, if there was a Hell or Heaven, see where the cosmos stood on things and find out (JUST LIKE YOU I MIGHT ADD) why there were so many events, locally and worldly, happening in this is “all powerful” God's Earth. How could the all-loving, perfect creator let this place be going so badly?
Now in your mind, I know you are thinking that I was a weak person and not being able to do things means failing. Quite the contrary, I have been a Production Manager for a large music conference, have a B.S. from GSU (Dean's List), was an Officer Candidate in the US Army as a Sgt. (injured in a training exercise and honorable/medical discharge), and am now a decorated Firefighter/Paramedic for a metro Atlanta FD and on a Homeland Security disaster medical team. The latter two came as gifts from God and the injury in the Army was a blessing in disguise. He (God) did not cause the injury, but in His good nature, made something tragic into something beautiful.
You were right about one thing, I do read a lot and I am a very critical thinker. I've been accused of being too analytical. I scored the highest in my rookie class on cognitive ability testing. I have to research things and see the facts too. So to accuse someone of wanting to know what's behind their faith in tangible form is to insult their intelligence in the first place. So do not say that we are wrong to research our faith, my friend. We reserve that right.
As for the first of your response, “to give factual credit based on religion”- There is more than enough science to back this up. I cannot begin to write it all down, as it would take volumes, but I will give you some starting points and suggest readings. The creator of this site, Richard Deem, has excellent sources and articles to read on creation. Scientist and bio-chemist, Klaus Dose, stated the following:
“…experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present, all discussions on the principle theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.”
In addition, your argument on physics of the matter has another view point. They truly depend on metaphysics. Perhaps there are new physical laws yet to be discovered that could eventually show that life emerged naturally. This will be hard to accept because the new laws will have similar characteristic to the old. It’s where your belief is coming from also. Natural science has proven that life did not occur from a natural chemical process with the known elements being present at the beginning of the Earth. You can read more on this from Walter L. Bradley, Ph.D.’s The Mystery of Life’s Origin. And I highly suggest that you take a look at chapter 3 in The Case for Faith by Lee Strobel. There are great arguments for an intelligent designer, namely God, in this chapter including the examination of 6 theories from science from Random Chance to Life from Clay.
As for the origin of religion, I have seen writings on both sides of the argument that Buddhism predates Judeo-Christianity and Judeo-Christianity predates Hinduism. What we do know is that Moses authored the first 5 books between 1500 and 1000 BC. And what he was writing down had been oral tradition for centuries before this. So this would date around the same dates as the oldest civilization in history, the Samarians. (and a quick interesting point on oral tradition- the religious leaders of these times were so meticulous on oral tradition, as were the communities around them that to have a fallacy in them as they were written would have been corrected by the masses or frowned upon by the higher ups in their society. {Craig Blomberg speaking in The Case for Christ}).
This takes me to the next one of your arguments, Noah’s Ark. I understand that this story is hard to conceive. I believe there was a regional flood and there is a whole theory called the Regional Flood Theory that explains this. Samarians have almost the exact same story of a different individual that built a large boat to sustain life for the flooding prophesied by their god. The land would have laid between the Tigress and the Euphrates, a very possible place for flooding of that magnitude. Could this be the same person in different religions? It’s hard to say. But there is some good geological evidence on the flood levels and depth/size of a ship’s hull to be able to withstand that type of flooding that coincide with the Ark’s dimensions. I would ask you to take a look at
www.creationworldview.com or
http://noahsarksearch.com/ararat.htm for further readings on this topic. It’s pretty neat just to see and know, even if you hold the agnostic/atheist view point.
Responding to the “gaps” in evolution- they are just that, gaps. I understand that DNA can provide a wealth of evidence. So it says we are related to the ancestral homo type primates. We are also undoubtedly close to the chimpanzee in DNA. But we are not them, so there are gaps. It is fine in theistic evolution to think we evolved from such primates all the way up to Cro-Magnon man and present. Even if we did so, it is all a part of God’s plan. My article states that whether we evolved or were placed on Earth at different time by God, its still God doing it all. See Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe.
As for Constantine developing the Cannon, this is simply not true. The Cannon was formed in Carthage in 397 A.D., sixty years after Constantine’s death and the Council of Nicea (
http://www.gotquestions.org/Constantine-Bible.html). As we know, King James convened the Court of Hampton to form the KJV Holy Bible in 1604. This book used the earliest forms from the Greek, Hebrew and Latin manuscripts. What they did not leave out is commonly accepted as non-historical by most all biblical scholars. You can find more about this in The Historical Reliability of the Gospels by Craig Blomberg and The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel.
The Big Bang is a widely accepted theory and belief in both science and religion. The idea of if there was a noise or not is totally moot (no pun intended). The whole argument there is that it happened and why or who created it. Of course you know our answer here: God. To deny that something came from nothing is a paradox. This is best explained by Richard Deem on the site in “Answers for Atheists”.
The dinosaur argument I suppose I wasn’t strict enough on. I didn’t think that all life disappeared. I misstated my point. My apologies. However, I have never heard, even in all the material that I’ve read and documentaries I have seen in the classroom and on TV, that we came from a shrew. I would be interested to read that if you would cite your claims.
Furthermore, Earth time is not of God’s time. The Bible states that a thousand years on Earth is but a day in Heaven. Knowing that, there are theories that the Biblical “God Time” is simply not understandable to humans and on Earth. I will grant you that this takes blind faith which is a whole another topic that I will address later on in this response. It is stated that dinosaurs and reptiles and life of all kind was created on day 5 for and from God. We came later, namely one day, but we do not know exactly what kind of time table God was on, so Moses and the original Creationists can only write what they feel makes since to us on our terms. The bible clearly states that we will not understand His ways and or His business at all times. This again, requires faith. And once more, I will talk about that later in the paper.
Now in your assumption that God has thumbs or twiddles them, you have taken this scripture too literally. We were created in His image in that he feels, loves, cares, has anger, vengeance, hurts, etc. All these emotions for God are magnified to infinite power of what we, as humans, can experience. As for life itself, his design is completely evident in that all life is a living organism with similar characteristics like respiratory, circulatory, nervous systems, etc. We again will address these emotions when we discuss faith.
Animals and souls: In Genesis, the humans are given charge over all other life. It does not say anything about animals not having souls. We don’t know. They have their own personalities, but perhaps it is just their God given inability to reason as the human does as he was placed in charge and thus gets a buy right into God’s Heaven where they came from in the first place. There was no “cut off” point. I know you will argue this back with me. It requires faith which we are getting to. If you want to get real technical with it, animals are not the race which inherited sin by a choice made by man to do so, therefore, they are not required to reason and be damned or blessed. They simply return home to God’s Kingdom.
The idea that you can argue that a human has no soul is most strange to me. We are of the mind and body in the flesh. The flesh is not perfect. Disease can affect it like Alzheimer’s; of which your data is inaccurate on. Being in the medical field and having two close relatives pass away from the disease, I can tell you that they do not lose all memory. In fact, they most always return to their earliest memories. They speak of times when they were young and half the time, they still recognize us! They do hallucinate at times, I realize that. But this doesn’t mean their souls have escaped or detached from them. When they are removed from the flesh that binds them to the Earth, they will know everything and everyone as God does. He tells us that throughout the Bible.
And one cannot enter the Kingdom on good deeds alone. They must achieve salvation through the Son, Jesus Christ. And I am sure you have a mouth full to argue that statement, as most atheists do. Perhaps reading up on NDE’s can help you further your knowledge on life after death.
In your closing, you suggest religion is “nice”. It’s beautiful! The love He has for us is unbelievable (no pun intended there in your case). It is amazing and it will benefit you more than you can ever imagine. The statement that you make about using religion for control over the people is flawed in a few senses. We all know that some individuals in the Catholic Church have used religion as power. People make mistakes and this is inherent in humans. But you cannot blame the Catholic Church or Byzantine Empire on the entire religion of Christianity. Furthermore, I would argue that the word “religion” is not what you think it is. Religion is an institution. Christianity is a relationship with God. God became flesh incarnate so that YOU could know Him personally. Through Christ, you are able to see and know God as intended before sin was introduced. When He saw sin and gave us free will, He knew that to save us, to understand us fully, that He would have to come down here, live with us and sacrifice His own son’s life to save us all. And that, my friend is where you get true love from.
To have faith is to love Him. Let’s tackle that one while we are at it and since it has been recurring here in this response. To have free will is to be able to choose. To be able to choose to love and accept Him requires faith in Him. I would presume you would argue that if God is all-loving, then why didn’t He just make you perfect from the beginning and let us live in His glory with all the animals on Earth? Fact is, he did and we blew it through disobeying Him in eating the apple from the tree. And if you don’t like that biblical version, you can simply say that sin is present in order for you to have something to choose from, thus the evil and wrong are present in the world. You mentioned world events making you doubt faith, so listen in on this part and address that question to yourself in a moment. If we were made with no choice and no free will, then how could we fully love Him and know Him completely? We could not. To have perfection, you must have its opposite, or how would you know it was perfect? To show Him true faith, you must have the other choice there to choose from. If there was no choice, then we would all be mindless drones walking around with no difference among any of us at all. But we have a choice and we are different and that is a metaphysical fact for us and by which the world is governed: if you have one, then you must have the other. As mentioned, it was created in perfection and we fell from that through free will.
Back to your wondering on how so much bad can happen in the world if God is present….it is that there is a cosmic battle ongoing. Satan or if you just prefer to call it evil, exists no matter how you look at it in any place, religion or not. Evil knew that free will was given and that it could use temptation to try and have us live our way or by our own will. But God tried to protect you from the very beginning in warning us not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. And He does it again every day by using Christ and the New Testament in telling you to live by His will and not your own. And there again is the choice to make; to take that leap of FAITH. That’s what it’s all about, friend! It’s the whole premise! See, read, and believe. You will experience things as you have never known them to be. And you will be attacked as well, because Evil is a sore loser and wants you back so bad it’s not even funny. You will see where God will turn tragedy into triumph and make light of awful events. God hurts. Evil knows this and will take every chance it has to get back at Him. You’ll ask I’m sure how can God hurt? Because He loves you so so much that makes it possible to feel pain. There again you have to have one for the other to exist. Hurt and Love. Pain and Joy. It is just the way it had to be designed.
I suggest you read Letters From A Skeptic and Is God to Blame by Dr. Greg Boyd. These books can help you understand my point on a great level. Most of all “Letters..” is a book of correspondence between him and his father on the questions from an agnostic posed for a believer. It raises wonderful questions and gives awesome insight to the most trying concepts that are hard to believe or make sense of.
I hope this helps and though you may not wish to hear it, anyone on this site that is a Christian will be praying for you. If you have refutes to this, I will do my best to answer them and if I cannot, I will do the best I can to point you in the right direction.