From Faith to Reason

Eph 2:8 Because by grace you have salvation through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is given by G-d:


9 Not by works, so that no man may take glory to himself.


While on the Jesus Bus we need to take a drive past the wilderness of logic and reason and evidence and
probability and on an on. Even though I know that the behavior of men is not explained by carefully considered logic but but by
emotion. There's the way it ought to be and there's the way it is.


Speaking only for myself, there are some of us that don't like to operate on blind faith. We expect something a little better than that. It might be OK for others, but it has no appeal to me. So I want to look at reasons to believe. Whether it is evolution or scripture, there ought to be a compelling reason to believe. I must not be completely alone. Origins is a subject that seems to generate alot of interest,from all directions. That should tell you something about the nature of man.


There is faith and there is reason and there is the intersection of faith and reason. But nothing gets in the way of emotional force, when it comes down to where the rubber meets the road. I know. I'm married and I have children.


What difference does it make whether the universe is one day old or one trillion years old? None really. It's largely irrelevant. Er... ah... that is unless you want to believe that there is this
mysterious force of biological evolution that requires a few billion years of time to improve the probability of its present outcome. Never mind about where matter evolved from, it's trivial.


It's for people like me, who have to make sense of things, that the puzzle of faith has to fit into a frame of reason. Sorry, I'm not inclined to take your word for it. Call me a skeptic. Having lived a few years, I'm beyond skepticism and deeply into the range of cynicism when it comes to certain avenues of interest.


In spite of these considerations, I have to point out that first of all, you need to know a thing or two. One of my frustrations is that I find that I have a very limited scope of knowledge. In my youth, I wanted to study mathematical physics. I had a love of the elegance and beauty of mathematical description of the physical world, because it opens up another window of experience. I never got that far. I managed to learn a few things about math and chemistry. That's it.


But that was enough to open up a window into the unbelievable complexity of biological life. It's for that reason that I find the idea of biological evolution totally unacceptable. In other words, if I knew nothing about math and chemistry, I would find evolution easy to believe. I simply wouldn't know any better. I wouldn't see the elements of myth and magic invoked.


Take a look at one of the earliest experiments known as the Miller-Urey experiment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment

Miller and Urey developed a cool experiment. There's just one problem. They violated uniformitarian principles. They have to do that because they know chemistry. They know that biochemical evolution will never, ever happen under the atmospheric conditions of the present. Sooooo, they have to postulate 'primitive conditions'. It's the only way that there is any hope of the chemistry working. No problem. Just work backwards so that you get the desired outcome from the desired input. In other words, they knew what they wanted to start with, and they knew what they wanted to end with. So it was a simple biochemistry problem they had to solve. So they got their organic products. They didn't get anything close to.... living organisms. Oh well, back to the drawing board.


In my view, what they proved in their experiment is the total impossibility of biochemical evolution. That's just my take. I mean, you really don't even have to try to do any
chemistry, the math alone will give you the answers. What they didn't know at the time was the double helix.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_helix


At the molecular level, it's the double helix that makes biological reproduction possible. It's almost possible, under the theoretical conditions imposed by Miller-Urey, to imagine that amino acids can be produced spontaneously and maybe even combine into proteins. But the idea that amino acids can spontaneously form the double helix structure necessary for biological reproduction, is just too much. And that's just one of the easier hurdles along the way to a 'simple' single cell. A 'simple' single cell, by the way, has something along the order of 50,000 simultaneous chemical reactions required to maintain cellular life. And the double helix
requires not just the amino acid components, but
also there is the trick of getting the sugar-phosphate backbone to come together just so. On top of all that, there is the truckload of information coded into the amino acid sequences.
The diagram in the wiki article is simplified. And the chemistry is a little more complicated than Miller-Urey supposed. It's wayyyy more complicated than Darwin supposed. If there is a single point in time that rekoned the demise of Darwinian macro-evolution, it was the day Crick
and Watson unraveled the double helix structure and chemistry of DNA. They'll catch up. Faith dies hard.


In simple terms, it is a chemical impossibility for the double helix to form spontaneously. It is mathematically impossible for the double helix amino acid sequence to randomly generate useful information. Biological life didn't get here that way. It's not something that just happened.


"Watson and Crick provided the picture at just
the right level of detail that allowed this
whole field to explode," he says. "Until a
biological phenomenon is defined at the chemical
level, it's very hard for the chemist to get
interested or involved. But the moment you have
a specific structure of sugar, phosphate, and
heterocyclic base, all of a sudden you're in the
world of chemistry."

Eric T. Kool, a professor of chemistry at
Stanford University, agrees. "Chemists often
delve into biological problems once they know
enough chemical information to get their foot in
the door. That [DNA structure] was the foot in
the door for chemists. I can speak for most
organic chemists. They love to look at pictures.
This was the picture that really said this is a
chemical problem."

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/8110/8110dna.html


So, if you don't know biochemistry and you don't know probabilites (math), you are free to believe in magic. But it's hard to imagine spontaneous assembly of a double helix loaded with
information if you know any science. And it's not just the double helix, but the entire matrix of cellular reproductive chemistry, every component of which is REQUIRED for survival. Takes more than a little faith and blissful ignorance.


Just off the top of my head, there are two names that come to mind, realated to the issue of
origins, because I've read some of their work.They are of differing opinions, but mostly
reject the textbook ideas of biological
evolution. Not based on a religious bias, but on the merits of science. There have to be thousands of other scientists who would also reject the textbook versions. They will not say anything because they don't want to step
into the middle of the storm. I can't blame them. Especially if you look at what happened to Hoyle as a result of his position on origins. And he was even a self-professing atheist. The evolution community priesthood is highly intolerant of dissent. If you happen to be a university student, take that truth to heart. And take a couple hours to read some of the contribution these two have made to science, as opposed to wishful thinking.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Sarfati


If you never spent any time in a chemistry lab maybe you can believe in good luck. But if you have spent time in a chemistry lab you would have to think that, no way in heaven, even under
the most optimistic scenario, is DNA the product of spontaneous generation.


So what does any of this have to do with Jesus? Simple. If you reject the first verse of the Bible:


Ge 1:1 At the first God made the heaven and the
earth.


then all the rest has to be brought into
question, because it has no authority. Jesus did not question the authority of scripture.


Personally, for me the tough part for belief in the Bible are the parts about Jesus loving sinners. Why does a self-existent Creator need to love anyone? THAT doesn't make sense.
Nevertheless, if we are able to accept the teaching of scripture, it is there.


Joh 3:16 For God had such love for the world
that he gave his only Son, so that whoever has
faith in him may not come to destruction but
have eternal life.


John chapter three is one of my favorite passages in scripture. The love part is confusing to me, but the rest of it provides a glimpse of Jesus explaining salvation.
If I believe that Jesus died to pay the penalty for my sin against G-d, then I would have to believe that G-d is a source of love that is beyond my capacity to imagine. It's not part of the state of existential being, now is it?


On the other hand, when you look around at the wonders of creation, there is an element of pleasure in the experience. We were made to recognize and enjoy the beauty of G-d's creation, whether it's the face of a friend or the companionship of a pet. It's clear that the Creator built into the creation a source of enjoyment. We intuitively recognize the purpose in all creation. We see the Creator in the creation. And THAT can never, ever be explained by evolution.


Ro 1:20 For from the first making of the world,
those things of God which the eye is unable to
see, that is, his eternal power and existence,
are fully made clear, he having given the
knowledge of them through the things which he
has made, so that men have no reason for
wrongdoing:


The journey on the Jesus Bus may begin as a leap of faith, but in order to make progress, faith needs to mature in an environment of reason. In other words, Why do you believe what you do?