Sled,
Accepting the existence of God is a pretty stiff challenge for some folks, at one time or another most of us have looked around at the seemingly random universe and wondered about our place in it. How did we come to be? Are we an accident, thrown together by some fortuitous gathering of ingredients in the emptiness of space? Is it really necessary to postulate the existence of a God, when our direct day-to-day experiences fail to show any measurable proof of a "magic spirit" keeping things in order?
We look at the chaos, the suffering on our planet, and we wonder how a Supreme Being could allow such pain and misery to exist. After all, in our pride as rational humans, we assume that a Supreme Being would view all the events on Earth just the same as we do, and use those "magic spirit" capabilities to make life pleasant for everyone. But our daily experiences show us in often brutally clear fashion that the universe ISN'T being shaped to suit us, so we conclude bitterly that there MUST not be a God! Prideful creatures, ain't we?
The interesting thing about our existence, is that things are far, far less random than people would have you think. We know that the universe is subject to the inexorable forces of entropy - everything, over time, will trend toward disorder and decay. Jigsaw puzzles don't put themselves together. Matter may coalesce into a rigid crystalline matrix of a given element, but stack enough of it together and under the force of gravity etc it will become subject to greater and greater pressure and heat along with all the other goop that gets attracted until it eventually gets molten down and spit back out. That beautiful stone you find in the riverbed might be a diamond today, but in a million years it may find its way back into a subduction zone in the earth's crust, meet up with some lava, and become a random swarm of carbon atoms once again. Entropy gets everything, sooner or later.
And yet, here is this interesting phenomenon called life - that produces order from chaos, that has (so we are told) gone AGAINST entropy over billions of years by continually evolving into more and more and more ORDER. How did all this happen? By trillions upon trillions upon trillions of fortuitous accidents that made things "better" in some way as these specks of life ordered themselves into varmints of assorted size and complexity. And somehow, this process of evolution miraculously occurs across the board. When a cosmic ray sizzles down and zaps a proto-monkey's DNA to produce an opposeable thumb, it also happens to enough OTHER proto-monkey's to produce a viable population that will filter the opposeable thumb down into billions of descendants. But hey, that seems improbable! Let's suppose instead that evolution occurs when a SINGLE individual experiences a beneficial mutation... and is lucky enough to survive the brutal process of natural selection long enough to pass its genes along into a viable population.
OK, so we get out our calcu-la-mator, start poking the numbers - lessee, four billion years here on Earth... . start with a single atom, that has to meet another atom, and another, and with this mix that is "just so" form a molecule... and then meet ANOTHER "just so" molecule to form a protein chain, and then meet up with OTHERS to form a blob, and then jiggle around mysteriously until we are suddenly ALIVE AND REPLICATING - woo hoo, we did it but we won't really worry about how!
So we start off as a prion, or virus, and work our way up the ladder toward single-cell status - NOW we're cooking! And we finally can start up a division of labor, by dividing ourselves and starting to branch out into different specialties. "Hey you! Form some sulfur-eating bacteria! And you - see if you can evolve some flagella so you can get into fluids and move around! Step it up, we don't have all day!"
Of course, there is no intelligence to these primitive blobs, so they only get to evolve when chance permits. A cosmic ray, perhaps a molecule HERE gives an advantage over a molecule THERE... . and maybe after a billion or two years we have some progress.
So those single-cell beasties slowly join into multi-celled beasties (completely by accident, surviving only by natural selection), which keep joining together to form successful variants while SIMULTANEOUSLY branching and branching and branching to create varmints that live in water, air, earth - lots of fortuitous things happening at a rapid, rapid pace.
And then one day, evolution has carried us along until consciousness and intelligence arise. A relatively furless ugly ape stands up, scratches itself, and decides to invent language. Civilization soon follows, and out of all that natural selection we modern humans have at last arrived. Not knowing where we came from, we speculate that some "magic spirit" produced us. We actually run across some supernatural beings, things that can't be explained by what we know, see people rise from the dead - and our beliefs in those "magic spirits" are reinforced.
Eventually we burp out a Darwin, and he says that things happen purely by natural selection, all characteristics we possess having been chosen purely because of the survival advantages they convey. The biggest problem with that theory, trying to figure out the survival advantages of DEATH, is brushed under the table, along with all the human characteristics that have no obvious survival benefit - compassion, love, beauty, laughter. Lower forms get along fine without them, and are STILL HERE for that matter, although we are told that these evolutionary changes that provided a survival advantage should have resulting in the old variants being squeezed out. Hmmmm, well we won't worry about that.
And we develop new sciences that let us look into things at both a cosmically huge scale (astronomy) and almost unimaginably fine scale (atomic physics). We suddenly see a whole lot more order and formalism than the hypothesized random structure might imply. Hmmmm, well we won't worry about that too much either
:-laf
In truth Sled, the universe is not as random as things may seem. The odds of a cosmic series of incredibly fortuitous accidents producing are vanishingly small. The hallmarks of intelligent design are all around you, and that design was penned by the hand of God. The living God did indeed walk amongst man 2,000 years ago, and literally hundreds of people saw Him after He rose from the dead. All those things that were written REALLY did happen, and to this very day you can visit Israel and see the places and the works that were wrought by those ancients with your own eyes.
Take a few years to study science, and think about the leap of faith required to believe that life on Earth won the cosmic lottery trillions of times over BY ACCIDENT... . then take a few years to study the word of God, and ponder the idea that we are here because a supreme architect WILLED it to be so. That "magic spirit" may not seem so far fetched!
The truth is out there waiting for you Sled, one of these days you will get out to check your oil and it will be lurking there under the hood to grab you! I hope on that day that you will take Jesus to your heart, and offer Him a ride in your truck... . it'll be the greatest day of your life!
PS - And you don't even have to be in a church for it all to happen, Jesus has been known to co-pilot many a Turbo Diesel
Oo. Oo.
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