Devotions: July 30

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Psalms 69:5-17

Before I get into this text I’ve got to say that, frankly, sometimes the Psalms make me uneasy. Often enough the author of a psalm will seem to declare his own righteousness while asking God to destroy his enemies. A first glance this seems pretty arrogant and presumptuous. One of the things that has helped me rethink that view is to think of the psalmist as a defendant pleading before a judge. If he is innocent (and yeah, even if he’s not, just bear with me) he will say “I haven’t done anything wrong!” Is our defendant literally saying he has never done a single thing wrong in all his life? Of course not. He’s saying that in this matter he has been unjustly accused, that he didn’t do what he is accused of doing.

Okay, back to Psalm 69.  This psalm has takes a different tact on his state before God. In verses 5 and 6 he says:

O God, you know my folly; the wrongs I have done are not hidden from you. Let not those who hope in you be put to shame through me, O Lord God of hosts; let not those who seek you be brought to dishonor through me, O God of Israel.

The psalmist (David, in this case) is laying himself bare, with no pretensions of personal righteousness. He is asking that God preserve the honor and good name of Israel despite what he has done. David is repentant. In verse 13 he goes on to ask God:

But as for me, my prayer is to you, O Lord. At an acceptable time, O God, in the abundance of your steadfast love answer me in your saving faithfulness.

What an amazing prayer, I love it!

Devotions: July 29

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Acts 16:6-10

So Paul, along with Silas and Timothy, have been wandering around preaching the Gospel. Verses 6 and 7 tell us that despite a strong desire to visit “Asia” (modern day Turkey), the Holy Spirit (or Spirit of Jesus) has so far prevented them. I wonder what the specifics of the prevention were but that’s not for us to know I guess. What is interesting is what happens next.

Paul has a dream (Acts 16:9) in which a man from Macedonia (just across the Mediterranean from Asia, where Paul has been wanting to go) is pleading with him to come there and help. Immediately they go, “concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.” This is, in my mind, one of the clearest illustrations of a call or leading towards ministry in the Bible. God used a dream to make clear to Paul (notice all three knew immediately what it meant and what they needed to do).

How often do we find ourselves wanting to go to our own “Asia”? Paul was even well intentioned here, he wasn’t planning on having a vacation in Istanbul, he was planning on preaching the Gospel throughout the entire area. So here’s the question, do you have a “man from Macedonia” that God is using to lead you?

Mark 11:22-24

This is frankly a really hard section of Scripture for me to understand.  Jesus has just triumphantly entered Jerusalem, cleansed the Temple of the money changers, and is now on his way out of town for the night. He and the disciples pass by a fig tree that Jesus had earlier cursed and the disciples are astonished that the tree is, in fact, now dead. Jesus replies with a statement on prayer:

Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him.

Now this seems kind of paradoxical since we are all very aware that we don’t get everything we ask for. In fact, it would be a very bad thing if that were the case since we may very well ask for something bad for us or others unintentionally. Here are some thoughts and possibilities concerning what Jesus says here:

  • Jesus often seems to use hyperbole or exaggeration to make a point. Perhaps what he is trying to say is “Look guys, don’t be surprised when you receive something you prayed about, God desires to give you you’re heart’s desire, have a little faith.”
  • This verse needs to be thought of in light of James 4:3, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” I think what James is saying is that when our desires and intentions are in tune with God’s desires and intentions, we can have confidence and faith that God will see it through.
  • God is not a genie. Jesus is not giving a “if you do X, then God must give you Y” kind of direction. Today it is popular in too many Christian circles to force God into the role of a personal genie bottle. We rub Him the right way and we are assured to get a better job, the latest gadget, or even a mended hurt. Instead God assures us that even when we are going through that “valley of the shadow of death”, He is with us and loves us.
  • In Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, the great Christian author C.S. Lewis says: My own idea is that it occurs only when the one who prays does so as God’s fellow-worker, demanding what is needed for the joint work.

Faith & Science Forum Questions: Part 6

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So it has been a long, long while since I last posted some answers to questions from the Faith & Science forum at the Living Stones church this spring. There is one last set of questions I received from a reader:

Question: Did Pangea exist?

Answer: Pangea is what is known as a supercontinent. The idea is that all seven of the current continents (North America, South America, Australia, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Antarctica) were actually one giant continent some time in the past and that continental drift (the various “plates” that make up the surface of the earth moving away from each other) has caused the supercontinent to break up and give us the Earth we see today. This theory was first formulated in the 1920s but since the 50s-60s has become generally accepted. The evidence for its existence basically comes down to an argument of similarity. There are 3 main similarities that people find:

  1. Geographic – if you look at a globe, you can see how it looks like South America and Africa fit together like puzzle pieces.
  2. Geologic – geologists have discovered similar rock formations that line up squish the continents together. Also plate tectonic theory gives a mechanism by which the continents have drifted.
  3. Fossil – many fossils of similar organisms are found on continents that are on opposite sides of the earth. Given that many plants and animals are fairly region-specific the indication is that the areas where the similar fossils were found were once in closer proximity than they are now

Almost all forms of origins theory (including most young earth and old earth creationism) have no problem with the existence of Pangea. Many young earth creationists, for instance, believe that Pangea was broken up during the Flood.

Question: Was the flood described in Genesis universal (covering the entire earth), or the Black Sea flooding of 5540 BC?

Answer: The question of the extent of the Flood found in Genesis is still very hotly debated among Christians. Some of the “how would that work?” questions from a universal flood are:

  • how much water is needed to flood the entire earth? If there were not any Mt. Everest type mountains at that time and Pangea existed, perhaps the necessary amount is not completely unreasonable.
  • how many animals would Noah need to preserve on the Ark in order to have the present diversity since the Ark was not big enough to hold everything we see today? Many young-earth creationists appeal to rapid adaptation, natural selection, and speciation to go from general animal “kinds”  to the present number of species, e.g. a single pair of cat-like creatures produced all the cat-like species we see today.

Many Christian thinkers have held that the Genesis Flood was not necessarily a global flood, but rather  a catastrophic, but localized, flood in the Middle Eastern region.

Two geologists from Columbia University proposed in 1997 that a catastrophic flood occurred around the Black Sea as it became connected to the Mediterranean Sea around 5600 B.C.  It is thought by some that this flood event may be what is described in the Genesis account.

For a much more thorough discussion of a localized flood interpretation for Christians wanting to be faithful to the Scriptures I would highly recommend a short blog series by apologist and biologist Rick Gerhardt:

  1. Why See the Flood as Global?
  2. Flood Geology
  3. Science and the Flood
  4. Strained Arguments

Question: Is the Earth old or young?

Answer: That is an important part of interpreting scientific data and yet is somewhat of a secondary issue for the Christian. The clear scientific consensus is that the Earth is something like 4 billion years old. The alternative view of young earth creationists is that the Earth is something like 6-10 thousand years old. The first thing to note is that this is a huge difference. Scientists are reporting that the Earth is 400,000 times older than what Biblical literalist suggests. That’s more than just a little error. It suggests that there are 3 possible explinations:

  1. there is something pretty major that scientists are missing from their understanding about the way fundamental physical processes work
  2. God created the Earth 10,000 years ago to look 400,000 times older
  3. the literalist interpretation of Genesis 1 is not correct

As a physical scientist, I have a hard time seeing how 1 is very likely. Certainly scientists do not claim to know everything, but to get from 4 billion to 10 thousand years requires some very dramatic changes in things like nuclear decay rates or the speed of light and we’ve never seen any significant changes in those.

Explanation 2 is possible, however it does not seem likely as it suggests that God is somehow tricking us. Additionally this idea has virtually no explanatory power, it doesn’t explain “why?”. Lastly, there’s no way to verify it. If we start claiming that God just made reality look like reality, but that it isn’t really real, then how can we trust anything?

This leaves possibility 3. While this flies in the face of my conservative Evangelical upbringing, this seems the most likely. Over the next few posts I think I’ll try to develop this idea more. I think it is important to note that people often see 3 as being less faithful to the Bible or as an open door to taking everything in the Bible figuratively or an open license to throw the doctrine of  Biblical inspiration and inerrancy out the door. I don’t think that is the case. I’ve known too many people who are faithful followers of Christ and defenders of the Bible who happen to believe the best interpretation of Genesis 1 is that of an old earth.

Faith & Science Forum Questions: Part 5

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Question: Is there any legitimacy to the giant humans found outside Virginia city?

Answer: Short answer is — nope. I am assuming you are talking about the large, vaguely human-shaped footprints found in the late 1800′s when the Nevada State Prison was being built. The best information I could find online gives a pretty good explanation for the footprints and why they are unlikely to be human.

Question: What about Archaeopteryx and whales with rudimentary legs.  Do these point to macro-evolution?

Answer: Archaeopteryx fossils have been one of those “Creation killers” that people often throw out as bullet-proof evidence of evolutionary transitions. The problem is, it in fact has fully functional feathers that are very similar to modern bird feathers. The regions of the brain needed for flight appeared to be fully there, unlike  the much smaller and underdeveloped brain of dinosaurs. So the bird-like features are pretty much fully developed in Archaeopteryx, not transitonary. You might also read a couple articles on Caudipteryx and perhaps Answers in Genensis’s take on the issue. I tend to think that Archaeopteryx was really a bird with some dinosaur-like features. Remember though, that common features does not automatically mean common decent.

As far as whale legs go, while the idea that whales started out as land mammals that just sort of liked the water better is somewhat appealing as a simplistic story, I think there are still some issues such as bone structure and the ramifications of aquatic life that must be addressed as well.

Question: Is adaptation of species the same thing as mutation leading to new species?

Answer: No, they are a bit different. Adaptation is basically the process of natural selection making the organism or species better suited to their environment. Think of your pupils adapting to the change in light intensity as you walk outside. That is  adaptation by an individual. Another example would be the famous Peppered Moths. As tree trunks got darkened by industrial pollution, the light-colored variety of the months stuck out more and consequently got eaten more often than the dark-colored variety. That would be a species adapting. What’s important to notice is that the light-colored moths did not turn into the dark-colored moths (i.e. the dark color did not appear out of thin air), rather there was a shift in the relative amounts in the existing population.

Mutations are genetic mistakes, and by themselves they do not create new species. The vast majority of mutations are harmful, if not fatal. In order for the few beneficial ones that happen to create a new species they would have to cause such large changes that the part of the population which has the mutation could no longer breed with the part of the population that does not. We just do not see that in practice. What we are more likely to see is a part of a population is somehow cut off from the rest (usually via geographic isolation such as volcanic eruptions, flooding that creates a new river, etc.) and gradually that sub-population loses enough genetic variation (through mutation and adaptation) that it can no longer breed with the original population and the original species has split into two distinct species.

Question: What do you think of cloning?

Answer: This somewhat of a tricky question because “cloning” is a bit of a loaded term. Generically, in biology cloning means making identical copies of DNA (molecular cloning), cells, or organisms. I think there is little controversy or debate over molecular or cellular cloning. In that sense I think cloning can be a very cool and useful tool. The controversial parts are human cloning methods such as research/therapeutic cloning and the potential for reproductive cloning. They are controversial because they use somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is essentially creating a new organism (a human embryo) either to harvest for research or make a genetic duplicate. I feel harvesting human beings for research is highly unethical from a Christian perspective. Sacrificing the life of some people for possible gains for others is totally against traditional medical ethics in  the United States (and much of the world).

Reproductive cloning has even broader issues. For instance, if a person is cloned, who has the “rights” or ownership of the genetic code since both people have identical DNA? DNA evidence would become virtually useless in criminal courts. Since cloned human beings would be perfect organ donors, will there be pressure  or even requirements that they donate? Will “identical” copies become “better” copies via genetic engineering? Even beyond these issues there is the problem that cloning is a rather inefficient process. For instance, Dolly the famous cloned sheep was the only survivor among 3 that were born from 29 embryos which came from 277 eggs. The first cloned horse had a similar story, the only survivor of 14 embryos coming from 841 eggs. At least initially, the vast majority of cloned humans would suffer from terrible birth defects and many would not survive infancy.

I believe science must be tempered with ethics. Just because we can do something does not mean we should.

Faith & Science Forum Questions: Part 4

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Question: What is the strongest defense for or against Darwinism?

Answer: I will share what I personally see as the strongest defense for and against Darwinism because I think it is important for us to know what the strongest and weakest arguments of our position are. Bear in mind that this question depends a lot on the person you ask and there are lots of possible answers.

I think probably the strongest defense for Darwinism is a simple appeal to extrapolation. Scientists do observe many of the evolutionary processes such as mutation, natural selection, adaptation, and even the occasional speciation that could generally be summed up as “groups of organisms change over time”. So the idea is that if one simply applies a general “things change” thinking to millions of years of earth history, small changes become big changes, and big changes become “my great granddad was a protozoan“. Evolution is not a particularly complex theory in that sense and I think that is perhaps why some evolutionary biologists get a bit irritated with creationists. They will say something like, “Evolution is just change over time, why is that so hard to understand?” However, that argument is really a bit of a distraction. Virtually nobody, even among the creationist community, argues that no changes have occurred. The real questions are whether the evolutionary processes I mentioned earlier can account for the origin of all life on Earth (i.e. the extrapolation is valid) and do it better than any other model out there. Personally, I’m skeptical on both fronts.

For me, the strongest defense against Darwinism is perhaps more observational than scientific. It’s simply you and me — our personality, our history, our morality, how we live, and the wondrous ways in which we work. The biology of the human body is simply stunning and awe inspiring. When you begin to contemplate how many individual bits go together and work together to make us work, how, even after hundreds of years of scientific endeavor, we are in so many ways just scratching the surface of our knowledge, one cannot help but wonder about the majesty, creativity, and power behind it all.

How can we defend the weak, protect the helpless, and elevate the selfless actions of those who give their lives to others? It is not promoting the survival of our genes. It is not ridding the species of the unhelpful, weak, or even costly parts. Why do we cherish love, creativity, and compassion? Hitler, Stalin, and the “dog eat dog” world of the corporate ladder are more in line with the naturalistic world view than Gandhi or Mother Teresa, and yet they are antithetical to the human understanding of the way things ought to be. Simply put, why do we live our lives every day as if naturalism and Darwinism are not true?

If  you are an atheist or perhaps a scientist “on the fence”, I think it is worthwhile to ask yourself, deep down, is there more to your life and being than matter in motion? Does atheism/naturalism account for the incredible good and incomprehensible evil that humanity is capable of? Do you desire purpose and meaning beyond yourself? Let me suggest that perhaps it is worth your time to take a serious look at Christianity. It is not “blind faith” nor a leap in the dark, but rather an incredibly power and comprehensive model for discovering who we are, what we are, and who we may become. Beyond that, it is also the most marvelous, loving, and personal of relationships that we may ever have.

Question: How does the fossil record explain trees being found fossilized in sediment from several periods?

Answer: I’ll assume the question is dealing with the age of the earth and modern geology. Fossils that lie in multiple geologic strata are commonly called “standing” or “polystrate” fossils. Young earth and old earth scientists have used these fossils as evidence for their side and against the other.  A prime example is the Joggins Fossil Cliffs in Nova Scotia. It is a virtual fossil forest with many fossilized lycopod trees. Nobody really disputes the fact that the fossilized trees are found in multiple strata, so the question is, how did they form and are they consistent with a young or old earth? Here is a summary of the arguments:

  • Young Earth – the fossilized trees could only form from rapid sedimentation like one would expect in a world-wide flood (such as in the story of Noah) and uniformitarian (“modern”, old earth) geology can not account for them because it assumes sedimentation is a very long process. For more information see the ICR article titled The Polystrate Trees and Coal Seams of Joggins Fossil Cliffs.
  • Old Earth – the fossilized trees could indeed be formed by rapid sedimentation but an appeal to non-uniformitarian geology is not needed. Local floods likely caused the fossilization and is consistent with “modern” geology. For a more detailed rebuttal of the Young Earth proposal see the Talk Origins article titled “Polystrate” Tree Fossil.

One can see that both sides agree that some sort of flooding or rapid sedimenation caused the trees to be fossilized where they stood, but they interpret the results within their existing scientific framework. I do not see any clear evidence myself that standing or polystrate fossils “prove” either side.

Faith & Science Forum Questions: Part 3

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Question: How does the human genome project help prove or disprove evolution/God etc.

Answer: That is an excellent question. First off, it might be important to answer the question, “what is a genome?”. A genome is the complete set of DNA found in a cell. It is all the genetic information for that organism (in this case a person) including all the genes. It is analogous to a 1 billion word book and is found in almost every cell in the body. The mapping of the human genome was an enormous project that took several years, millions of dollars, and is one of the biggest accomplishments in molecular biology.

Now, back to the original question. In many ways the Human Genome Project itself does not help us either way, frankly. People are often looking for a “smoking gun” or the proof/disproof of both evolution and God. The bottom line is that the problem is not in the facts but rather the set of assumptions or presuppositions (our worldview) that we come to the table with. The fact that we are 98.4% identical to chimpanzees at the DNA level can either be interpreted as:

  1. we evolved from a common ancestor, or
  2. we were designed by a common Creator

From that fact alone we have no basis to choose between options 1 and 2, so we most often end up picking the option that is consistent with what we already know or believe.  What we need to do is get a more comprehensive look at the world and see what model we think fits the observations or facts the best. Since I am a firm believer in giving people information and letting them decide on their own what to do with it I will give some resources/information about the human genome project from different viewpoints and give you some of my own thoughts as well as that of a scientist I really respect and happen to also disagree with.

When it comes to Darwinian evolution, I personally believe that the Human Genome Project has shown some places where the evidence is lacking. For instance, often times evolutionists will point out junk DNA (chunks of DNA that don’t code for genes/proteins or other obvious functions) as a proof of decent from common ancestor. They suggest that because 95% of the genome is comprised of junk DNA, and God obviously would not have designed “junk”, that the junk DNA must have merely been carried along in the evolutionary process. However, scientists are finding that junk DNA really isn’t necessarily  junk:

Many aspects of the genome structure remain to be elucidated, including the role of the intronic or “junk” DNA that makes up 99 percent of the genome – it’s telling that few people still call it “junk,” although its function is still mysterious.  — New York Times article entitled Genome Mania by Stanford biophysicist Stephen Quake

and that natural selection should get rid of the junk it it really were that:

Furthermore, the present lack of significant amounts of nucleomorph secondary DNA confirms that selection can readily eliminate functionless nuclear DNA, refuting ‘selfish’ and ‘junk’ theories of secondary DNA. –  Eukaryotic Non-Coding DNA is Functional , published in 1999 in the journal Proceedings: Biological Sciences

Additionally, just the sheer size and complexity of the information encoded in the human genome points me more towards a Designer and less towards random, unguided processes. For more on the Creationist perspective you might look at a good overview article published by the Institute for Creation Research (young earth) and as well as an article discussing junk DNA from Reasons to Believe (old earth). You might also look into Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome (book) and The Code of Life (DVD).

For a theistic evolutionists point of view I’d like to direct people to Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D. who is a Christian, former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute and the lead scientist of the Human Genome Project. He had the following to say about his work on the human genome in an PBS interview:

Well, evolution is a theory. It’s a very compelling one. As somebody who studies DNA, the fact that we are 98.4 percent identical at the DNA level to a chimpanzee, it’s pretty hard to ignore the fact that when I am studying a particular gene, I can go to the mouse and find it’s the similar gene, and it’s 90 percent the same. It’s certainly compatible with the theory of evolution, although it will always be a theory that we cannot actually prove. I’m a theistic evolutionist. I take the view that God, in His wisdom, used evolution as His creative scheme. I don’t see why that’s such a bad idea. That’s pretty amazingly creative on His part. And what is wrong with that as a way of putting together in a synthetic way the view of God who is interested in creating a group of individuals that He can have fellowship with — us? Why is evolution not an appropriate way to get to that goal? I don’t see a problem with that.

While I agree that it is certainly possible that evolution could have been God’s “creative scheme”, I don’t think it is as probable as a designed, directed, and invasive “creation” of life and human beings in particular based on the totality of the evidence I have seen. But differences aside, Dr. Collins does say something that I think should be profound and encouraging to young Christian scientists:

For me, as a person who believes in a personal God, the opportunity to uncover something about us that nobody knew before but God knew is really a moment not to be missed. It expands the experience of discovery in ways that people who are not believers, I think, don’t quite get to experience. It’s an opportunity both for scientific exhilaration and actually for worship.

Faith & Science Forum Questions: Part 2

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Question: Is the speed of light slowing down?

Answer: I’ll assume you’re taking about the hypothesis that the speed of light in vacuum (known as c) has changed with time in such a way that the universe could be “young” but appear much older.

I think it’s fairly universally accepted in the scientific community that the speed of light, c, itself has not changed significantly with time. We really only have around 130 years of decent measurements of the speed of light (going back to the Michelson–Morley experiments) so it is difficult to conclusively say it has not changed over the course of the existence of the Universe. However, since the speed of light is used extensively for careful measurements such as GPS navigation and the fastest measurable events (a laser pulse lasting one quadrillionth of a second) if the speed of light were changing we would know about it fairly soon. As the experiments and instruments used to measure the speed of light have become better and more sophisticated the exact value has changed somewhat. This “narrowing in” on the true value has sometimes been interpreted as an actual change in the speed of light but is in fact normal for most scientific determinations of physical constants.

The speed of light does however depend on gravitational fields (Einstein’s theory of General Relativity) and frame of reference (Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity). This is where some interesting things can happen. Answers in Genesis has an article outlining some ideas and issues from a Young Earth perspective and Reasons to Believe has an article talking about time dilation from an Old Earth perspective.

Question: Do you believe that the first 25 elements of the periodic table existed before the big bang?

Answer: Let’s see, that would be Hydrogen through Manganese. I don’t think the current Big Bang model would nearly allow for even Hydrogen (the lightest atom) to exist before the “bang”. The Big Bang is looked at as an extrapolation of the expansion of the Universe backwards in time. That is, we currently observe that the Universe is expanding via a similar method to Doppler radar used in weather tracking. If we trace that expansion backwards in time there is a point at which we have infinite density (we can not compress the Universe any more) and infinite temperature (consequently infinite energy). At this point pretty much all the laws of physics break down and we can not “look” any further back in time. This then, is “the beginning” from the scientific standpoint. Because the Universe would so dense and hot in that first part of the “bang” all atoms and probably even subatomic particles such as electrons and protons could not exist. Moreover, I personally do not see a logical, theological, or scientific necessity for the first 25 elements to exist before the Big Bang. I believe God spoke the Big Bang (whether it be six thousand or sixteen billion years ago) into existence.