Scientific Evidence for a Creator

Posted on January 10, 2018 by dkoop

I loved science growing up and I still do.  Science and the Bible may seem at odds and cause controversy in our culture, but Science and the Bible are not enemies.

They are actually working in different realms in similar things in the quest for truth. Many people don’t realize that the early scientists who really launched out the scientific revolution were believers. People like Albert Magnus, who is the grandfather of geology, or Newton, who founded calculus, or Robert Bowl, who founded modern chemistry, or Copernicus, the astronomer, or Kepler, or Newton and Galileo, who launched a whole scientific revolution.

“If you really study science it will bring you closer to God”   James Tour, professor at Rice University Department of Chemistry and Nanoscale Science.  He holds seventeen US patents.

 Here are some scientific discoveries that help bring us closer to God as we see his power, intelligence creativity all around us.

  1. The Universe Had a Beginning

The ancient Greeks believed that the universe was eternal.  In science the “steady-state universe” theory proposed the universe has always existed.[i]

But this belief can no longer be supported by scientific evidence. Over the last fifty years, beginning with Albert Einstein, scientists have amassed an impressive amount of data that points to a startling conclusion: our universe had a beginning.

At a specific moment matter, space, energy, and time came into existence in a creative explosion known popularly as the Big Bang. Before the Big Bang there was simply nothing. A strange thought, isn’t it?

Though Mark Vuletic, along with a number of physicists, has argued for the presence of “virtual particles” that “come into existence in otherwise empty space for very brief periods of time,” the prevailing cosmological model maintains the theory that the Big Bang came out of nothing.[ii] At the same time, the predominant philosophical model holds that something cannot come from nothing.

If both theories are accepted as reliable, we are faced with almost unavoidable theistic implications. Who but an eternal, uncreated being who exists outside of time and space could have preceded and initiated the Big Bang?  For those of us who accept Genesis to be true, the Big Bang came as no surprise.

  1. The Origin of Life

An increasing number of scientists are concluding that it’s just plain impossible for non-living chemicals to somehow have linked together and become organized into the first living cells.

Darwin theorized that life began with reactions in what he called a “warm pond of chemicals,” and this was easier to believe in Darwin’s day because back then there didn’t appear to be much of a big leap between non-living chemicals and the most basic one-cell organisms.

After all, when Darwin looked through a primitive microscope that only magnified 200 or 300 times, what he saw when he looked at a single-cell organism looked pretty uncomplicated, a glob of protoplasm with a dot in the middle. That’s why he called them simple one-cell organisms.

But today, thanks to advanced technology, we know that even the most basic one-cell organism is incredibly complex. In fact, a cell is more complicated than anything the greatest scientists and the smartest supercomputers can duplicate.

*Harold Franklin in the Way of the Cells says, “Single-cell organisms are high tech factories on a microscopic level, complete with artificial languages and decoding systems, with central memory banks that store and retrieve impressive amounts of information, with precision control systems that regulate the automatic assembly of components, with proofreading and quality control mechanisms that safeguard against errors, with assembly systems that use principles of prefabrication and modular construction, and a complete replication system that allows the organism to duplicate itself at astonishing speeds.”

All this is in ONE cell, a high tech factory. When you think about the billions of cells or FACTORIES working together in a body all interconnected doing digestion, reproduction, circulation, nervous, our bodies are more complex than the world’s largest city!  In other words there is more going on in your body RIGHT NOW than in all the factories in the world!

And all this happens by blind chance?  After all, blind chance is an incredibly inefficient way to accomplish anything complex.

Lee Strobel illustrates it like this:  “I’ll take this Scrabble Game and start with 26 Scrabble tiles. Each tile has one letter of the alphabet on it. Just to demonstrate how random process, blind chance, is so terribly inefficient, if we were to mix up these tiles, how long do you think it would take us blindly to reach in and to spell the word “evolution?” Nine letters in that word.

First you go until you get an “e,” and then you put it back. The next one has to be a “v,” and you put it back. You mix it up, and the next one has to be an “o.” You have to spell it out that way. Picking one tile a minute, how long do you think it would take?

To spell just the nine-letter word “evolution” at one tile a minute by blind chance would take you 1,600,000 years.  And if you wanted to, by blind chance, pick out the word “construction,” a twelve-letter word, at one tile a minute, it would take you a thousand million years, on the average, to do that. That is how terribly inefficient random process and blind chance is in accomplishing anything complex.

In a similar way, how long do you think it would take to randomly link together the building blocks of life?

Let’s go back to some basics of biology and remember that living cells are built with protein molecules, and protein molecules are built with hundreds of amino acid links. In all, there are 20 different kinds of amino acids, some of which are lethal.

*PICTURE OF PROTEIN MOLECULE –

 So if we ignored the question of where the amino acids came from in the first place and we eliminated the deadly ones and we gave every possible opportunity for these amino acids to link up, how long do you think it would take for the hundreds of amino acids necessary to form one protein molecule to link together by random process?

Do you think it would take a long time? It would. In fact, the number is so astronomical that if I told you the number, we wouldn’t be able to grasp how big it is, so I have to use an analogy to let you know how long of a time it would take to form one protein molecule on the average by random process.

You start with an ant, and this ant is a very slow ant. It takes this ant 15 billion years to walk one inch. This is not a fast ant. It’s not a very strong ant, either, because this ant can only carry one atom at a time. You know how small an atom is. An atom is so small, it takes a million atoms lined up to equal the width of a human hair.

Now, here’s the question. Even going one inch in 15 billion years, carrying one atom at a time, how many atoms could that ant carry and how far could he carry them in the amount of time it would take, on the average, for one protein molecule to form by random process?

Well, even at that incredibly slow speed, that ant would be able to carry 600,000 trillion-trillion-trillion-trillion universes the size of our universe and carry them 30 billion light years in the amount of time, on the average, it would take for one protein molecule to form by random process.

That’s a really long time. And you know what? It doesn’t give us life. It just gives us one single, solitary, lonely non-living bachelor protein molecule, and it takes a 239 protein molecules of various kinds to come together again in the correct type, in the correct order to form a basic living cell.

That’s trillions of times longer than the longest estimate of the age of the Earth.”

It’s no wonder that Dr. George Wald, the Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist and professor emeritus at Harvard University, concluded that…

“It’s not just unlikely that life could emerge by chance and it’s not just implausible and it’s not just improbable. It is outright impossible.” Dr. George Wald, Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist and professor emeritus at Harvard University.

Or as the British expert on the origin of the universe, Sir Frederick Hoyle, put it, “Believing life could result from chance is like believing a tornado could sweep through a junkyard and the winds could accidentally assemble a fully-functioning Boeing 747 with stewardesses and all.”

Let’s be rational here, Evolution fails to explain the origin of life.  But the flip side of that is that the very evidence of life in all of its intricacy and all of its molecular complexity points powerfully in the direction of God as being creator.

In the next post, we will look at a few more reasons from science to believe that “God created the heaven’s and the earth.”

Darrell

  1. [i] The website ofPBS, “Steady-State Universe,”http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/universes/html/univ_steady.html.

[ii] The Secular Web, “Creation Ex Nihilo—Without God,” last modified 2011,http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mark_vuletic/vacuum.html

Other Sources:  The Case for a Creator,  Lee Strobel, Zondervan, 2004

www.ExploreGod.com

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In the Beginning…God

Posted on January 10, 2018 by dkoop

Did you see the latest Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi?  As I watched this movie with my family, it hit me later that if a viewer didn’t know the beginning of the Star Wars story the movie might be enjoyable but may not make much sense to them.  Someone who hadn’t seen the original trilogy might wonder things like:

“What is a Jedi?”

“What is the force?”  “Is that what happens when you eat too much 3 bean chili?”

“Who is Luke Skywalker? And why is he important?”

You may not even care about this movie series and that’s ok, the only reason I mention this is to explain that the beginning of a story is very important; perhaps the most important part of the story because it explains everything that happens in the rest of the story.

The bible is best described as a story—a true story—the greatest true story ever told—but like all stories we can’t fully understand this all-important story unless we start at the beginning. And, that’s what we’re doing as a church. For the next 5 year we are studying the bible by looking at its main stories and characters. This week we start at the beginning in Genesis…the most important part…and from now through next five years we’ll do a survey of the entire Bible.

So in your bible let’s look at page 1—I always wanted to say that!

Genesis 1:1 – In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

The simple statement that God created the heavens and the earth is one of the most challenging concepts confronting the modern mind.

The first two chapters of the Bible describe the creation of the universe—and introduce the creature—man…but the focus is on the creator. When the curtain first rises in the first verse of Genesis, only God is there.  “God” is mentioned here 32 times in Genesis chapter 1!

If you were to drive out into the country tonight away from the lights of the city and look up you would see countless stars! In 1996, astronomers basically did that with the powerful Hubble Space Telescope. They focused its lens on a small and utterly black patch of space right next to the Big Dipper. They left the shutter open for ten days. This one exposure revealed 3,000 galaxies out beyond our own Milky Way galaxy. Each of these 3,000 new galaxies contained hundreds of billions of starts, planets, moons, comets, and asteroids. In 2004 scientists did it again. This time they focused on a patch of darkness next to the constellation Orion. They left the lens open eleven days this time and discovered ten thousand more galaxies. I could go on because it turns out the Hubble Telescope has revealed that there are over one hundred billion galaxies out there in the universe! But Genesis 1:1 and now science affirms that it wasn’t always this way! “The universe and time itself had a beginning.”[i]  Science refers to the beginning as “The Big Bang”  Genesis refers to the beginning as “creation.”  Science is not sure of it’s cause, but Genesis is clear to name the cause of universe’s existence:  In the beginning there was God!

God did not need to create the universe; he chose to create it. Why? God is love, and love is best expressed toward something or someone else—so God created the world and people as an expression of his love. We should avoid reducing God’s creation to merely scientific terms. Remember that God created the universe because he loves us.

The creation story teaches us much about God and ourselves. First, we learn about God:

  1. He is creative.
  2. As the Creator, he is distinct from his creation.
  3. He is eternal, all powerful and in control of the world.

We also learn about ourselves:

  1. Since God chose to create us, we are valuable in his eyes.
  2. We are made in His image and his most important creation.

In our next series of posts we will look topics of science including cosmology, astronomy, physics, microbiology and evidence for an intelligent designer (God) but it is important to note that the biblical view of creation is not in conflict with science; rather, it is in conflict with any worldview that starts without a creator.

The most important aspect of the continuing discussion is not the process of creation, but the origin of creation. The world is not a product of blind chance and probability; God created it. 

Genesis not only tells us that the world was created by God; more important, it tells us who this God is. It reveals God’s personality, his character, and his plan for his creation. It also reveals God’s deepest desire: to relate to and fellowship with the people he created.

God took the ultimate step toward fellowship with us through his historic visit to this planet in the person of his Son Jesus Christ. We can know in a very personal way this God who created the universe.

The heavens and the earth are here. We are here. God created all that we see and experience. The book of Genesis begins, “God created the heavens and the earth.”

I hope you will continue to join us in our story of the beginning, God and creation.

Darrell

[i] Stephen Hawking, The Nature of Space and Time, Princeton University Press, 1996
Stephen Hawking is the former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and author of A Brief History of Time which was an international bestseller. Now the Dennis Stanton Avery and Sally Tsui Wong-Avery Director of Research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and Founder of the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at Cambridge, his other books for the general reader include A Briefer History of Time, the essay collection Black Holes and Baby Universe and The Universe in a Nutshell.

 

 

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Unstoppable Growth

Posted on November 15, 2017 by dkoop

Christianity is the single fastest growing religion in the world. For example, in AD 100 there were 360 non-believers for every believer. Today, there are only nine non-believers for every believer, and only four of those non-believers are from unreached people groups.

Considering the growth rate of the world’s religious blocks: Christianity is by far the fastest-growing religion in the world today. The total population of the world increases by 1.72% annually.

The world’s religions growth percentiles are as follows:

  • Buddhists 1.7%
  • Nominal Christians 2.2%
  • Hindus 2.3%
  • Muslims 2.7%
  • Non-religious 2.8%
  • Bible-believing Christians 6.9%

Evangelical Christianity has grown by more than 300 million believers in the past ten years. About 10 million of these new Christians are from North America and Europe, and the rest -290 million-are from developing countries like Nigeria, Argentina, India and China.

Over 700 million people in 220 countries have seen the Jesus film, with 41 million indicating a commitment to Jesus Christ and to follow-up Bible studies.

After the 70 years of oppression in the Soviet Union, Christians number About 100 million – five times the number of the Communist Party at the height of its popularity, and 36% of the population. More than 15,000 public school teachers are now teaching morals from the Bible and the life of Christ in their classes.

In Central Asia, a church planted in Uzbekistan just four years ago Has grown to 3,000 members and has planted 55 other congregations.

Mongolia, which had no church at all as recently as 1991, now has More than 3,000 believers in 17 congregations. And the Mongolians have sent their first missionaries to work with Operation Mobilization in India.

In Nepal, the world’s only official Hindu country, over 100,000 Hindus have met the Savior in the last two decades.

Every month another 15,000 in India are baptized as new believers in Jesus Christ. In India there is 1 pastor for every 7 churches. In Sudan the ratio is one to twelve.

In China, there are now about 80 million evangelical believers – growing at a rate five times that of the general population. Over 30,000 conversions a day take place in China alone.

In just over two years more than 30,000 Chinese Xiao gave their lives to Christ. It all started with a showing of the ‘Jesus’ film and summer teams of 20-30 Christians who traveled there to teach English and witness 1-on-1 to the elite students of the province.

In recent years, the best-selling book in Japan has been the Bible. In a government survey, Japanese citizens were asked to name the greatest religious leader in history. 67% replied, “Jesus Christ.”

In 1900, Korea had no Protestant Church and it was deemed “impossible to penetrate.” Today, six new churches open every day in South Korea, and it is site of nine of the world’s largest churches – some with more than 800,000 members. Today Korea is 30% Christian with 7,000 churches in Seoul alone. Millions of Buddhists have come to Christ.

In 1982 there were 321 Korean Protestant missionaries. By 1992 that number had grown to 2,576. On May 25, 1995, the South Korean Church dedicated 105,000 young people for at least two years of mission service. Another 3,000 Korean missionaries are now being trained to go into China.

The one million Koreans in northern China, in what Koreans call the Kirim-Song area, are experiencing revival. About 100,000 are now believers.

Latin America has over 400 million people, more than 50 million have become evangelical Christians. By the end of this decade, a majority of the people in Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador will be evangelical believers. Chile, Costa Rica, and Bolivia are about 40% Bible-believing evangelical. Already Mexico’s population is more than 35% evangelical. In Latin America some 34,000 believers are added to the Church per day.

Puerto Rico now has the highest number of evangelicals per square mile of any country in the world. Of the country’s 3.5 million people, one million are evangelicals. They have 7,000 churches, 10,000 pastors, nine Christian TV stations, 13 Christian radio stations, 130 Christian schools and 350 Christian community service organizations. More than 1,000 Puerto Rican young people are now training to go as missionaries to Muslims.

In Brazil one hundred years ago, there were no evangelicals. In 1980 there were about 12 million Protestants. By 1995, that number had increased to more than 40 million, with more than 80,000 churches and 150 Christian radio and TV stations. The number is expected to reach 50 million by the year 2000. At least five new evangelical churches open every week now in Rio de Janeiro. Church growth country-wide has reached over 5,000 new churches annually.

One new church that is just 16 years old now runs 14 Christian radio stations, four TV stations, has missionaries serving in 25 Countries and 6 million members.

In Buenos Aires, Argentina, the church “Ondas de Amor y Paz” (Waves of Love and Peace) attracts 225,000 people each week. Services take place daily in a converted movie theater from 9 AM to midnight, and every month another 3,000 new believers are baptized.

In Africa the church is on fire. It’s the first continent to become the majority Christian (over 50%) in a single century. Over 25,000 new believers per day mark the growth of the Church.

In a single summer in Mombassa, Kenya in East Africa, 56,000 Muslims came to faith in Jesus Christ.  In one baptismal service in the ocean on the coast of Angola in Southern Africa, 10,000 were baptized in one day.

In a six-year period in one Muslim country two million Muslims came to Christ, and missionaries in dozens of Muslim people groups are planting small churches of former Muslims worldwide.

More Muslims in Iran have come to Christ since 1980 than in the previous 1,000 years combined. Before Khomeini’s revolution in 1979 there were about 2,000 Iranian believers. After years of intensified persecution, there are now more than 15,000.

There’s a seminary in Indonesia where to graduate you have to do all the schoolwork plus start a whole church plus see at least 15 Muslims come to faith in Jesus Christ. In the past 6 years, these students have started more than 600 churches and seen 40,000 Muslims find new life in Christ.

The government of Papua New Guinea recently mandated Bible teaching in every school in the country.

In October 1993, the Philippines was solemnly consecrated to Jesus Christ in a massive rally around the Quirino Grandstand in Luneta Park in Manila – a rally attended by a million believers.

In North America, 85 million copies of the New International Version Of the Bible have been sold in the past 15 years; and 42 percent of its purchasers read the Bible every day. Every week 34 percent of the American population reads the Bible outside of church – that’s 75 million weekly exposed to the Word that “will not return void”. On an average day Americans will buy 35,932 Bibles.

Many cities are experiencing a fresh spiritual awakening – mostly among young people. For example, recently in Wichita, Kansas, each of 3,000 Christian high schoolers committed themselves to pray over the lockers of 10 students in their schools and to then invite them to a massive rally. Ten thousand showed up at the rally, where more than 6,000 teenagers came to faith in Jesus Christ.

Prayer groups are getting big. More than 2.7 million gathered at one time in Yoido Plaza in Seoul, Korea -the largest face-to-face meeting of humans in history. About 45,000 gathered for prayer at the national soccer stadium in Guatemala City, Guatemala. And 26,000 gathered in the Blue Jay stadium in Toronto, Canada to pray.

In southern California, about 300 high schoolers gather once a month to pray for the world.

The number of people who are being presented the plan of salvation every day is now at least 260,274. Pray for today’s quarter million plus. May they respond to the call of Christ. Every day now the average number added to the body of Christ worldwide averages 174,000.  3,500 new churches are opening every week worldwide.

Our annual growth rate of church planting is presently at more than 8% per year. We have seen countries like Singapore have a 10% increase of those who have seen Christ come into their lives.

In the 1980’s 10% of Korea and 10% of Chile turned to Christ, and over 10% in Indonesia – the largest Muslim country in the world. Indonesia is now over 25% Christian.

Every 14 days another translation of the New Testament is begun in a new language. If we’re still here, at least some portion of the Bible will be translated into every language on earth by the year 2020.

Join us in our series Unstoppable and learn more about what Christ is doing in our world, our church and our lives.  http://www.RidgeFellowship.com

Source: http://www.thetravelingteam.org/articles/growth-of-the-church

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Unstoppable

Posted on November 14, 2017 by dkoop

In the United States Christianity is openly mocked in most media: television, movies and print.  Nightly News portrays a world seemingly in despair with no hope.  The U.S., Canada, and Europe continue their downward slide away from God in their rejection of anything having to do with Christ and the Bible.  Even common sense and tenets of basic human morality are regularly attacked and vilified.

Yet the truth is that, in our time, worldwide, God is winning.  The Holy Spirit is greatly moving in what was once called “the Third World”. We need to be thankful and even amazed at what God is doing!

“Look at the nations and watch – and be utterly amazed.  For I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told.”  –Habakkuk 1:5

Every day, 20,000 Africans come to Christ.  Africa was 3% Christian in 1900 and is now over 50% Christian (Vision 2020).

In 1900 Korea had no Protestant church and the country was deemed impossible to penetrate.  Today Korea is 30% Christian with 7000 churches in Seoul alone and several of these churches have over 1,000,000 members (Vision 2020).

On June 15th, 2006, 3,000,000 believers paraded through Sao Paolo, Brazil in the world’s largest “March for Jesus” (William Stearns).

In A.D. 100, there were 360 non-Christians for every true believer.  Today the ratio is less than seven to every believer as the Holy Spirit does more than we could ever ask or imagine (Vision 2020)

There are currently 60-80 million Christians in China with between 10,000-25,000 converts a day (Open Doors).

About 500 Muslims come to faith in Christ every month in Iran–a country ranked among the top ten persecutors of Christians in the world.  Many of the new believers are young, since 70% of Iran is under the age of 30 (Vision 2020).

The number of Christians in Indonesia has grown from 1.3M forty years ago to over 11M today.  (Operation World).

The Jesus Film has been translated into nearly 1000 languages and over 200,000,000 people have indicated decisions for Christ as a result of the film (Campus Crusade).

If Bible translation had continued at its historic pace, providing a Bible in every people group’s heart language would have been accomplished in 2150.  Thanks to God’s working through Wycliffe’s Vision 2025, the work has been accelerated by over 100 years and is now on pace to be completed in 2042 (Wycliffe).

Missionary-founded churches in Japan are being turned over to nationals to lead, so missionaries can plant other churches.

No Christian was officially allowed to live in Nepal until 1960.  Now there is a church in every one of the 75 districts of Nepalwith estimates of over half a million believers (Operation World).

Are we seeing a Bangladesh “Book of Acts”? A Church leader there wrote to a friend recently: “By your strong prayers the Lord has saved 4,452 people and planted 150 churches from January to June, 2006. Prayer request: Our goal is to plant 300 churches and see 9000 saved in 2006.” (Vision 2020).

Christian radio through HCJB is being invited into places such as Russian prisons that would not allow missionaries.  Soldiers are abandoning pillaging missions when they listen to the stolen radios HCJB had distributed to the people and they are accepting the Lord.  These “fixed-tune” radios are broadcasting Christian programming in native languages (HCJB – Truth in Motion).

Every day 50,000 people in countries served by Asia Access come to Christ (Asia Access).

In 2005, Fellowship of Christian Athletes had over 5,500 campus clubs called “Huddles” with more than 275,000 participating (Fellowship of Christian Athletes).

The government of Papua, New Guinea recently mandated Bible teaching in every school in the country (Vision 2020).

2006: FCA receives above 100,000 at over 150 “Fields of Faith”events around the country.  In 2004 this was initiated with 6,000 people (Fellowship of Christian Athletes).

More people worldwide are committed to praying for worldwide revival than ever before.

Based on forecasts from organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations, the world net population is forecasted to grow at less than 2% annually.  In other words, if Christians can lead others to receive Christ faster than that, the lost can be reached at an increasing rate.

If only 1 out of every 6 believers “reproduced” themselves one time each year, the entire world would be reached for Christ by the year 2020!

Our Lord’s Great Commission can be accomplished…people from every tongue, tribe, people, and nation can be told about the awesome grace and mighty power of God…and God is giving His people the opportunity to be a part of making it happen in the lifetime of this current generation!

Join us to learn more about what God is doing in the world, our church and our lives in our series, Unstoppable based on the book of Acts.

http://www.RidgeFellowship.com

Source: http://www.prayerfoundation.org/world_christian_growth_statistics.htm

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