Thinking God's thoughts after Him? Or pretending God isn't there?
The typical scientist of today cannot explain symbiotic amphibian/algae in terms of evolution without sounding like idiots. Or perhaps more like brainwashed automatons spitting out the same old stuff decade after decade! I have soldiered on in the blog world for several years and have seen that the majority of Darwinists have swallowed a staggeringly improbable and increasingly debunked hypothesis whole and will not have their intellectual stomachs pumped even upon threat of death because in actuality their adherence to Darwinism is metaphysical in nature. Science is so often not science at all, it is religion. The religion of Anything But God is big business. But is it in any way logical?
One of my favorite bands of my younger days was The Moody Blues. I first heard of them as the perpetrators of a standard-issue 60's rock ballad = Go Now. They sounded a little like Gerry and the Pacemakers meets the BeeGees back then. They were one of the first popular progressive rock bands, however, when they began going for a symphonic/rock fusion and became one of the classic "Seeker" bands...always searching not quite finding The Answers to The Questions. A bit like King Crimson but far more successful, they had a series of hit albums and songs in the late 60's and early 70's, such as...
Here is the remarkably difficult and simple truth...we are able to traverse three dimensions and are bounded by a fourth. We can postulate and theorize about other dimensions to the material world in which we live. We have. What we cannot do is escape our materialistic prison physically.
Herein lies the problem. If, as the lamentably misguided Carl Sagan said, the Universe is all there was, all there is and all there will ever be then there are massive problems that strain credulity.
1) By the laws of thermodynamics, we know that nothing is being created or destroyed. Never have we observed things popping into existence. Do not be fooled by the assertions of those who have studied Quantum Mechanics. Even if a particle can seem to be two places at once, even though it may seem to react to conditions exerted upon another, the sum total of particles observed never changes. Nothing is being created or destroyed. Ergo, there is no natural source for existence.
2) By these same laws, we know that the Universe is running downhill from energy into entropy. We are heading for heat death. We also understand that the Universe is NOT eternal but rather had a beginning and it is headed for an end. The Universe is not eternal. There is no material way to produce it.
3) We have also learned that information is not produced by the material world. There has never been a commenter who has been able to refute this and there never will be, either. Information is intelligence transmitted/received. Read through that post and think on it.
4) There is no natural causation for life. In fact you cannot find that science has a good definition of life itself for they can only describe what organisms have it and describe aspects of it but as far as knowing what life itself consists of...no natural means to produce it, no way of completely defining it down to an essence by mankind. We know when it is present and when it is gone.
5) There have been educated fools who have tragically tried to explain how something comes from nothing, often by first insisting that it doesn't come from nothing. Stephen Hawking is the latest epic fail. Read Buy The Truth's series to see what I mean...
There is only one logical conclusion, that God created all dimensions, time included, and invented the concept of a material world and then spoke it into existence. God is supernatural and it is limiting to God to say that He "exists" outside of the natural material Universe because "exist" is a finite and temporal concept. God transcends time and space and matter because they were His idea and He created them. What God does is far beyond "exist" and so far beyond it that we cannot grasp the magnitude of the difference between existence and Reality.
Man didn't invent God, as the foolish like to contend. God revealed Himself to us and the Bible is His Word, a means of communication between a higher power outside of and beyond existence Who is too different from our temporal existence for us to grasp apart from His Word. Can you teach algebra to your dog? Can you teach fish how to sing Handel's Messiah? Those things may have a tiny incredibly remote chance of happening. That existence created itself? No possibility at all. God invented logic and therefore the Universe has logical laws. But the secrets behind the logic and the very most basic and intricate ways that subatomic particles and very huge objects behave are beyond us.
Kepler wanted to "think God's thoughts after Him" but we do in fact come to a place where we cannot pass by using our finite minds. Those who are determined to pretend God is not there will resort to the absurdity of having an observed force of the material world CREATE the material world!?
"...Stephen Hawking is doubtless a very intelligent man, but in his most recent book The Grand Design (surely a title that is supposed to be ironic) he has shown that even the most intelligent of scientists can write like a fool, and this monograph will become a classic for that very reason. He followed up his inanities in an interview on Larry King Live on September 10, 2010. It is now evident to all (if anyone was hitherto in any doubt) that Hawking’s brilliance is in a very narrow field indeed, apart from which he gropes and stumbles like a drunken man. Early in his book he announces
Philosophy is dead. It has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly in physics. As a result scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.
As William Lane Craig has remarked, such a verdict is
not merely condescending, but also…outrageously naïve. The man who claims to have no need of philosophy is the one most apt to be fooled by it.
Indeed, Hawking and his sidekick Mlodinow proceed to show just how ignorant they are of philosophy, theology, the philosophy of science, the history of philosophy, the history of science, and general science itself. In the Larry King Live show Hawking was asked who his hero was, and why, to which he responded:
Galileo, the first modern scientist who realized the importance of observation.
Well, you can have who you like as your hero, of course, but the historical claim about Galileo is utter rot. He couldn’t hold a candle to the likes of Kepler, for one. Galileo was a second-rate scientist in the main, who continued to his dying day to deny gravitational force as constraining bodies to rotate around the sun, clinging to an Aristotelian idea that celestial bodies ‘naturally’ moved in ‘perfect’ circles because they were not acted upon by a centripetal force, and he refused to accept Kepler’s careful observations and tabulated data that planets were subject to gravitational pull and moved in ellipses. He likewise refused to believe that the sun and moon caused the tides, as Kepler showed, because he denied extraterrestrial gravity. Apart from his last work, under house arrest, on mechanics, the myth of Galileo’s supposed greatness is the deliberate invention of atheists, communists and other anti-Christians, who have cunningly warped history since the nineteenth century to promote a ‘conflict thesis’. Mighty interesting that Hawking, who has built his reputation on pushing cosmic gravity into the absurd, without observational corroboration, should have as his hero one who denied extraterrestrial gravity and who often espoused dogma over meticulous observation..."
Hawking is remarkably wrong!!!
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Infinity through dark glasses
Even something as straightforward as mathematics can give us a glimpse of things our finite minds find hard to grasp—but they’re real nonetheless.
Published: 3 May 2011(GMT+10)
There are some deep issues about God, eternity and the like which, while not logical paradoxes,1 are mind-stretchingly outside of our normal experience. They include: God’s triune nature; what the spiritual realm might consist of; how He can be infinite, and yet at the same time personal; and more.Activity outside of time
One could also mention the mysterious fact that God can be outside of time (as its Creator) and yet engage in activities which to us are always time-sequential. For example, John’s Gospel repeatedly indicates that there was love between the three persons of the Godhead prior to creation. But it is generally understood that, before this space-matter-time continuum was created, God was existing in a timeless eternity, mirroring an eternity yet future. Love requires some form of expression, and generally communication. Yet our experience of communication is one word after another, i.e. a sequence in time. In fact, in our time-bounded cosmos, even wordless expressions of love have a beginning and ending, both of which involve time. So how can there be love in timelessness?
But it is precisely in the field of mathematics itself, where rigorous proofs are possible, that we find evidence of an ‘irreducible complexity’ to the world.
It is both common and reasonable to resort to the notion that our finite minds simply can’t be expected to have the ‘processing power’ to grapple with such things, any more than a goldfish can be expected to grapple with genetic algorithms, or a cat comprehend calculus. Skeptical materialists,2 of course, will generally paint that as a copout. To them, it just shows that the concepts themselves are irrational, hence unreal.
The mysteries of modern physics
Increasingly, however, mankind’s God-ordained3 investigations are discovering things which show that even this present world is far more mysterious than we generally think. These include the way in which time actually flows at different speeds in different parts of a gravity field.4 Several creationist physicists have made use of this experimentally proven concept (without adjusting for it, GPS locations would drift by metres each day). Because of it, it becomes both feasible and understandable for light to have reached us from the most distant stars in a universe that is 6,000 years old (by Earth clocks).5
Wikipedia.org
Kurt Gödel
When the cleverest physicists try to make sense of it, they start to come up with notions so bizarre that one could almost question their grip on reality. In all seriousness, many of them maintain that the best way to understand what happens in QM experiments is to invoke the idea of ‘parallel universes’. This means that when something happens in this universe, all other possibilities are covered in other universes. Say for instance that you were to roll a ‘6’ on one of a pair of dice (rather than any of the other five numbers), then at that moment five alternative (‘parallel’) universes spring into existence (or have already existed among an infinity of such universes). That way, all of the other five numbers can come up, too—one in each universe.
That interpretation of QM is, perhaps surprisingly, fairly popular among physicists. It might be easy to dismiss it as being fairly obviously irrational. But there is no doubt that the things this idea is trying to explain include some really weird stuff. Like the observation that a particle widely separated from its ‘twin’ is instantly affected by something that happens to the other particle—regardless how far apart.
Meaning in mathematics?
Despite the weirdness of the world such things reveal, optimists might hope that some future theory could unify all these phenomena.7 They would like to be able to reduce everything to a much simpler set of mathematical expressions. This quest and its link to deeper meaning was parodied around 1980 in the science/philosophy spoof series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The universe’s ultimate supercomputer was assigned the task of finding the meaning of “life, the universe and everything”. After countless eons of number-crunching, the answer emerged as ‘42’.
Radar Youtube Intrusion:
Now back to our article:
Even given our limitations, our finite minds can, it seems, use the tools of mathematics to confirm that there are things that, though real, are out of our conceptual reach.
It’s as if Gödel was formalizing the idea expressed in Ecclesiastes 3:11b:
“ … he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”This is often thought to refer to our hunger to understand things, especially the deep timeless truths of the way the world is and operates. It is God, the preacher says, who has placed this quest for knowledge into the hearts of humanity. But He has done things in such a way that no person is able to find out everything about His works from beginning to end. Some things are going to remain forever out of reach.
Mathematics and infinity
Wikipedia.org
George Cantor
But here, too, it’s more complicated than that. It turns out that mathematics reveals not just the reality of infinity, but even deeper (or greater, or higher if you like) infinities—even though that hardly seems possible at first glance. How can it do that? In all those numbers you can count, there are ‘sets’ of numbers. For example, all the even numbers, or all numbers divisible by 8, and so on. The number of such possible sets can be shown to also be ‘infinity’. But mathematician George Cantor formally proved that this ‘infinity’ is actually greater than the first ‘infinity’ mentioned above. And that’s not the end of it; by looking at this infinite number of sets, there is a higher infinity again above that. In other words, there is a ladder, or infinite hierarchy, of infinities. And above and beyond that still, mathematicians are catching glimpses of something so high above this ‘infinity of infinities’ that they themselves are saying that it will probably never be approachable by the normal laws of mathematics.10
Contemplating all this should make even the most hardened materialist pause and draw breath. Even given our limitations, our finite minds can, it seems, use the tools of mathematics to confirm that there are things that, though real, are out of our conceptual reach. In this way, we are allowed at least a very tiny glimpse into some of the eternal and unsearchable depths of God and the world He made. But no more than a glimpse; it’s as if we have discovered a sign saying, ‘There are wondrous things beyond this point, but for you it’s this far, and no farther for now.’
As the Apostle Paul put it, talking about our present existence, before we are enlightened in that new creation: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). How tremendous that we can, right now, through Christ, truly know the infinite-personal Creator God. We can know the One who knows all about all of these things—and all about each one of us—already.
Related articles
Further reading
References
- Logical paradoxes (e.g. questions of whether God can create a married bachelor, or make a rock too heavy for Him to lift) are not mysteries potentially capable of resolution by a greater mind, but can be dismissed as meaningless non-issues/absurdities. See also If God can do anything, then can He make a being more powerful than Himself? What does God’s omnipotence really mean? Return to text.
- Those who believe that matter/energy is the only reality—there is no supernatural. Return to text.
- Genesis 1:28—the Dominion Mandate. Return to text.
- Predicted and explained by Einstein’s General Relativity (GR). Return to text.
- See Hartnett, J., Starlight, Time, and the New Physics, Creation Book Publishers, 2007; and Humphreys, R., Starlight and Time, Master Books, 1994, which both have models based on time dilation (both at creation.com/store). Return to text.
- Einstein himself always had difficulty with QM, which is notoriously resistant to reconciling with GR. Return to text.
- In fact, the search is on for such a TOE (theory of everything). It is meant to unite QM and GR. So far, rather than heading in the direction of simplicity, it has only succeeded in throwing up further bizarre notions such as string theory. See Bates, G., Is string the next big thing?, Creation 30(2):32–34, 2008. Return to text.
- Of equal or greater complexity to arithmetic. The theorem is also commonly stated as that there are true statements in the system that are not provable from the axioms. Return to text.
- Elwes, R., It doesn’t add up, New Scientist 2773:34–38, 14 August 2010; p. 36. It has been taken to mean that perhaps our brains are not capable of fully understanding themselves, i.e. limits to the neuroscientific endeavour. Return to text.
- Ref. 9, p. 38, A ladder of infinities. Return to text.
Actually, God is The Answer! Do you have the ability to understand? Or will you be defiantly questioning until your dying day?