"May Adonai bless you and protect you! May Adonai deal kindly and graciously with you! May Adonai lift up his countenance upon you and grant you peace!" (Torah, Numbers 6:24-26) And Jesus said, "Allow the little children to come unto me. Forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of God. Truly, I say unto you, unless you receive the Kingdom of God as a little child does, you shall not enter therein." (New Testament, Mark 10:14-16)

Sojourning at an Oasis Paradise

My purpose for living this life, and for writing this blog, is to understand the faith that links us to God. I wish to explore and discuss the reality at the heart of all of the world's religions. This is an immense task, but I know that God also has faith in us, trusting that we do desire the truth, as well as freedom, love and wisdom. Thus, as always, He meets us halfway. Even as God has given us individual souls, so we must each of us trace out an individual pathway to God. Whether we reside in the cities of orthodox religion, or wend our solitary ways through the barren wastelands, God watches over us and offers us guidance and sustenance for the journey.


Most of what you will see here is the result of extensive personal study, combined with some careful speculation. Occasionally, I may simply offer some Scripture or an inspirational text. I am a wide reader, and the connection of some topics and ideas to matters of faith and religion may not seem immediately obvious, but perhaps I may spell it out in the end... or maybe, you will decide that it was just a tangent. Anyway, I hope that you will find my meanderings to be spiritually enlightening, intellectually stimulating, or at least somewhat entertaining.

Saturday, February 24, 2024

Creation or Evolution?

Not only atheists are stupid enough to believe that they have all the answers without actually having investigated the truth. If you think that God (or Darwin) is pleased to know that you don't want to hear the whole argument because you have already made up your mind... think again. The Bible only says "why" God did this or that, not "how." God's idea of creation in "six days" really means "six eons." The time frame is fluid for an eternal Being. 

The creation is just too impossibly unlikely to exist by accident. The fine-tuned universe is obviously a creation, not a single instance out of a million attempts in a multiverse. One God creating time, matter and the laws of physics is the simplest explanation, as long as you don't insist that "supernatural" is ruled out before you do the logic. 

If you don't want to know the truth, don't claim to have all the answers.

Imagine... every time a scientist says, "something happened" that made the Earth habitable, something that made it possible for life to evolve, something that would eventually lead to the rise of humanity... we should hear... "God did something amazing!" It wasn't just random luck. It was all planned, step by step.

So what caused the Big Bang? The tiny flicker of a quantum. But quanta require space and time in order to exist, and before the Big Bang, there was no space or time. So where did the quantum come from? "Something happened."

All of the physical constants that we need in order for this Cosmos to exist had to come from a Mind setting them just right. There are too many of them, and their values are so specific, that there is no way for them to just happen all together at once so that everything would just happen to come into existence. "Something happened!"

Nothing (not even "nothing") just "happened" to exist. Everything was created by God, who designed us.

Adamant skepticism is not a valid worldview. Science must be open to the discovery of patterns and confirmation of theory. If a theory that posits its foundation on the existence of Mind hasn't been disproven, but it explains a plethora of questions, then it should be accepted, at least provisionally.

Still, the adamantly literal interpretation of a book of stories, even a spritually inspired infallible Bible, is equally invalid. The Bible was written thousands of years ago for people who did not share our modern world view, and didn't speak our language. When we try to insist that the words on the page are unquestionable, we are trying to make God fit into our own tiny box. God doesn't have to explain Himself in a fashion that pleases you. It's up to you to try to grasp how God works within the Laws that He created for our physical world to follow.

I absolutely believe in every word of the Bible, but I humbly request the option to interpret it in accord with reason and evidence. Genesis is not a literal story, but it is an explanation meant for people who would never understand the "scientific" facts on the ground. By reason, they grasped the story, but they didn't have any knowledge of the evidence, like we have. 

We talk about metaphors in the Bible when we want to interpret what it says in obscure language and apply it to modern times. If you can read the book of Revelations and say that "Babylon" is a metaphor, why can't you admit that the "six days" creation in Genesis is also a metaphor? God is eternal. His idea of time is totally different from ours. He was telling the story to men who could never understand the idea of millions of years, much less billions. He created the heavens and the Earth perfectly for us, and then He created us "from the dust" of the Earth. Nowhere does it say how He did either. 

We believe because it's his story. When we investigate his laws of nature, we begin to see how magnificent and wise his works were to bring us this far. Just because the story is a metaphor, that doesn't mean it isn't true. If God wasn't so much more amazing than we can think, we wouldn't be here to debate the literal-ness of his Bible.

The Story is impeccable, even without the evidence, if you have faith. And it is the same today, you can believe by faith alone, and ignore the glorious evidence of how our Almighty God created the entire Cosmos out of nothing, then made life and humanity from the dust, and saved us by his Cross. 

The Bible has never been contradicted by evidence, but only by men who refused to see the Truth. Reason was given by God, and He left the evidence for us to find, but we will ALWAYS need faith to find our Creator, and to make our peace with Him through Jesus, is uniquely begotten Son.