Ok, well the events of tonight have totally sucked.  To the extent that I am listening to my Pandora Vocal Chill station to try and mellow myself out, and on the fly purchased Star Wars: The Old Republic. I’m definitely not going to sleep anytime soon, so while I wait for the client to download and install, I figured I’d go through my old archive file to see if there were any posts that were worth saving, cleaning up and reposting.  I believe this post to be one of them, so will do my best to rewrite this monstrosity of a post.

As this post is so long, there is a More Link.

When this post was originally written I had just started attending church again on Wednesday nights.  While I now go to church on Sunday mornings instead of Wednesday night, the original sentiment of the opening of the post was that I’ve seen enough of the world without church, to know now that attending church regularly is definitely a worthwhile endeavor, and that fact still stands, if not even more re-affirmed in my mind then it was then.

The very first sermon that I heard on that first Wednesday night had a guest speaker (at the time of the original post I couldn’t remember the speaker name, and I can’t recall it now either), and while the guest speaker had an overall decent sermon there were several things that I just really scratched my head on.  In particular he made a point about science.

The guest speaker was discussing Jacob and the placing of poplar before his flock in order to get them to produce speckled offspring (not going to quote the scripture reference, but it is there in Genesis). As he was discussing this topic he commented that there are people out there that attribute what happened to science, and genetic manipulation, but that what happened was not science or genetic manipulation but the awesome power and a miracle of God.  This statement boggled my mind then, just as much as it boggles my mind now.  I have even recently re-read this story, and am still completely dumbfounded that the speaker made this statement.

The question I tried to pose in the original posting of this topic is the same now.  Why in the scientific and religious worlds is it always one or the other when it comes to trying to justify ones belief system?

I ask this because since the original posting of this topic, I’ve seen tons of supposed “Science” shows on TV that are trying to disprove the Bible, and yet at the same time we have supposed “Christians” running around that are trying to ignore science so they can go with “the power and awesomeness of God” instead.  While giving God credit for his power and awesomeness is a worthy thing to do, I also think that we should credit God for his Omniscience as well when that credit is due.  For me this is easily done by Christians in the support of scientific endeavors and research because increased scientific understanding within the right mindset will also increase our understanding of awesomeness of God.

This causes me to really scratch my head when I see Christians trying to push away science so that they can cling to a misconstrued interpretation of “the power of God”.

I say this because of how true science works.  Science, when it is done properly is a world of using the scientific method to prove or disprove theories and hypothesis.   Now it might be argued that this is not so for theories, however, if you can’t prove the rationalization of a theory then it won’t stand up forever because eventually someone will devise a way to test the theory and more than likely prove it wrong, or come to an inconclusive decision due to the lack of data or understanding as the results were something that isn’t immediately identifiable or explainable.

This means that in order for science to work correctly, science must be observed, which means that there must be someone or some device there to record the events as they happen.  Science must then be able to ask why an event happened, and then run tests to see if their ideas on why something happened are correct.  This means that science is always looking towards the here and now, and forward to the future, as that is what can be observed, and never back towards history.

Even if a scientist has access to original starting data and results of those experiments, if he questions those results then he would re-rest the original data and results for himself.  He would not just ignore the information  and implant his own assumptions in the place of obtainable test results, as it would taint the results of any data that was gained from that point on.

What this means for Christians is that science cannot, nor will it ever be able to disprove religion or the theory of creation, or any other miracle or event in the Bible.  This is because in order to disprove the Bible science would have to be able to either observe the original event, or discover a way to test the validity of the original event.  As at the time of the writing of the Bible, there was no such thing subject of science, and verifiable scientific documents are extremely scarce until sometime after the Dark Age, or were not even kept at all, there is no true scientific method to prove or disprove the events of the Bible.  There are some ancient astronomy charts and tablets available from the time of the Bible to show that an extreme basic form or science was already underway, and while astronomy is a form of science, the records from that time period are not conclusive or verifiable for disproving the events of the Bible.

The existence of astronomy brings me to the next point that just because we can measure the speed of light, and that with this information we can triangulate the distance to star and discover that it is 90 billion light years away, does not necessarily mean that the earth is at least 90 billion years old, so what is recorded in the Bible can’t possibly be true.

This is the point in this post where I comment on people being “Open Minded” because I know there will be people that read this that at this point want to be “Closed Minded” and just write this post and site off as belonging to a religious nutcase.

Continuing on, most modern well recognized religions, worship one God, which they consider to be the True God, and everyone else’s viewpoint is wrong, and most of them contain the history that pertains to their religion.  Within that history are events and actions that are completely unexplainable by any means other than calling them a miracle. Well, at least that is what they call them in the Christian religion.  Now whenever Christians talk about any of these miracles, you will almost always be able to find them referencing to “the power of God”, “the awesomeness of God”, “the Grace of God”, “the goodness of God”, etc.

As they continue to talk about these events and miracles, from time to time someone will try to answer the question of exactly how a miracle happened, other than to just say that it was “the power of God” because for some reason or another they have a gnawing feeling inside them that there has to be some other answer which could explain the miracle as well, and even better emphasized the awesomeness of God, because the knowledge to accomplish whatever would not have existed in general man in those days.

While this next part is hugely conjecture on my part, it is based off many conversations that I’ve had with both believers and non-believers of the Bible, and that is that instead of Christianity encouraging these explanations through science or accepting these explanations, they reject it, and the person that posted the explanation.  The person that posed the explanation then gets to hear such phrases as “I’ll be praying for you” , or “the devil has influenced you, let me pray for you” or if you want go back into history, these types of explanations would probably have been declared as heresy, and the people speaking them would have been jailed or worse, executed.

So now I pose the question, Why is this?  If my rationalization is correct, and science cannot disprove religion, then why are Christians so afraid of it, when they should be utilizing as much science as possible to disprove the false sciences of the world, or to further emphasize the awesomeness of God.

Now when I say “disprove the false sciences of the world”, I am referring the basic concepts of macro evolution, that we all came from monkeys, and that everything grew from amoeba’s.   I will give science and genetics some credit in that there are a lot of similarities between multiple species. However, genetic commonalities do not equate to scientific proof.  The fact that because of said commonalities certain species can carry the embryo of other species is not proof that we came from monkeys, in fact there is no proof whatsoever to back the concept of macro evolution and that we evolved from monkeys, it just doesn’t exist.

In fact most scientists today preach and teach the theory of evolution (specifically macro evolution), and many scientific unknowns as if they were scientific fact because they do not like depending upon faith, because faith is something that cannot be tested with repeatable tests, and therefore do not fall into the realm of the scientific method.

The thing about faith, is that it is mandatory in practically every religion in the world, because there are just so many aspects of religion and spiritualty that cannot be properly quantified.

The best description of faith that I have ever seen, actually came from an obscure ex-PCC (Pensacola Christian College), and self-professed ex-Christian, that I found once while scouring the internet.  He basically said that faith is meant to help us get from the unknown to the known, and that once we get to the known we no longer need faith.  Essentially faith is about getting from A to B to C to D, while starting at A , and not knowing what B, C or D consist of, or even how to get there.  Once you do finally reach D, in retrospect you know what it took to get through A, B, and C, to get to D, and therefore you no longer faith in regards to A, B, and C.   Now you need faith for wherever you are going from there.

I happen to disagree with this outlook on faith, because this is where faith comes into this topic, because faith is not about just looking forward to the uknown, but faith is also about looking back to the past, and to things that science nor history can explain due to complete lack of documentation of the time and era.

Sure as far as history goes we have the ancient hieroglyphs and other writings, but who is to say that our translations of such texts are even remotely accurate, because we are taught that our current interpretations of those writings are accurate.  The interesting thing about this concept is the fact that languages evolve with the passing time from generation to generation and what means one thing for a generation may mean something completely different for another generation several generations down the line when the meaning or context of a word or image is lost and therefore misinterpreted.

So we take all of this, throw it all together and I pose the following:

If Christianity believes in a God that is Omnipresent, Omniscience, and Omnipotent, then why can’t they believe in the possibilities of God using his awesome power, knowledge and revelations to account for various different things that are covered in the Bible that may be explainable by todays science.

While growing up, Christian children are taught “God knows exactly how many hairs are on your head” , and “God spoke to people directly back in Bible times” ,  Yet science had absolutely nothing to do with Jacob and the poplar rods ?  Who is to say that God didn’t tell Jacob what to do?  Just because it isn’t recorded in the Bible doesn’t mean that stuff didn’t happen. There is no recorded record of Jesus’ life from thirteen to thirty three (approximately).  No one disputes that the remainder of the years not recorded existed, they just weren’t recorded.  But I would be almost willing to guarantees that  If a Christian in today’s world, tried to say “Hey wait a second, behold the power of God, or awesomeness of God, not because he made it *Poof*, but because his hand of knowledge was present in guiding Jacob in knowing what needed to be done, so that Jacob would be ‘blessed’ or in this case grow extremely wealthy” ; that they would probably be heavily criticized for saying such.

Or even better yet, if God is Omnipotent and can create anything or do anything,  and he created the Earth and the rest of the universe, and in the way that he did, then why do they go against stuff such as the Big Bang Theory so heavily, rather than admitting that in today’s science, in the way that we understand things, that that theory, might just be accurate to some extent, but that the process didn’t take Millions or Billions of years to complete, but a matter of moments as God exercised his Omnipotence, and Omniscience in one great “Miracle” that created the Earth, and the Universe as we know it, placing every star and every molecule of matter in the exact position that it needed to be, including placing every ray of light exactly where it needed to be, and creating every scientific rule that we have discovered and the ones that we haven’t discovered , so that the Universe would function as a whole, without freakishly imploding upon itself.

This is not being Gullible, or straying from the faith … This is realizing that If a Christian truly has faith and belief in God, that a Christian should allow scientific explanations to be, and allow them to be presented, so that their faith can be shown, in that they believe in what is the unknown and un-provable, yet awesome power of God.

And for those hardcore agnostics or atheists that may be out there.  Christianity using science to clarify or demonstrate faith in their creator is no different than those that believe that we all came from monkeys. There is no proof either way. The only difference is that one belief holds you accountable for your actions and responsibilities, while the other belief pretty much lets you do whatever you think is right, according to your own moral judgments.

Well, I think that is a pretty decent re-write of that post, I actually managed to cut some stuff out. I think there was a comment or two that went with this post, but I figure maybe some new comments would be good, even if they are the same old comments as before.