Case for a Creator

[alwpgf]

Sounds like a great book.  I've been wanting to read Strobel's The Case for Christ.

[shernajwine]

The glorious feeling you have during worship and praise.  The way your spirit quickens when they read the Word before the preacher brings it forth

This hope that I have, the world didn't give it to me
This joy that I have, the world didn't give it to me
This love that I have, the world didn't give it to me
This Word that I have, the world didn't give it to me
This God that I have, the world didn't give Him to me
The world didn't give it and the world can't take it away

I am more than just confidant in the existence of God. I am in love with Him. I have never felt so in love with Him than I am now. Now that I know and am beginning to understand how AMAZING a God He is that He could create such a vast and beautiful universe in which He lovingly created for me. My feet are planted in the Word and I won't be moved by the thrashing and violent storm of deception that attempts to uproot me.

[shernajwine]

Chapter 6

It is hard to resist the impression that the present structure of the universe, apparently so sensitive to minor alterations in numbers, has been rather carefully thought out...The seemingly miraculous concurrence of the numerical values must remain the most compelling evidence for cosmic design. Physicist Paul Davies

Strobel starts out this chapter talking about a man named Patrick Glynn who has a background similar to Strobel's. He was born into a religious family and while earning his doctorate at Harvard he became a confirmed atheist. His wife's belief in christianity spurred him to begin investigating evidence for a creator. He says in The Making and Unmaking of an Atheist:
Gradually, I realized that in the twenty years since I opted for philosophical atheism, a vast, systematic literature had emerged that not only cast a deep doubt on, but also from any reasonable persepective, effectively refuted my atheistic outlook...Today, it seems to me, there is no good reason for an intelligent person to embrace the illusion of atheism or agnosticism, to make the same intellectual mistakes I made.

In this chapter Strobel interviews Robin Collins PHD, who has earned degrees in physics and mathematics at WSU and entered a doctoral program in physics at the University of Texas in Austin.

He talks about the universes fine tuning which referrs to the extraordinary balanceing of the fundamental laws and paramenters of physics and the initial conditions of the universe. He speaks about the incredible and overwhelming odds for our fragile balance on the razors edge of life.  One tiny fraction in one direction or the other and life is not possible....the odds are SO overwhelming that even atheistic scientists are completely amazed and reluctantly use the word "miracle" but with a reminder that it doesn't conclude design. 

In the interview Collins says...."Let's say you were way out in space and were going to throw a dart at random toward the Earth.  It would be like successfully hitting a bull's eye that's one trillionth of a trillionth of an inch in diameter.  That's less than the size of one solitary atom." These are the odds at which we have won the "living lottery" here on earth!

He mentions that skeptics say, if the universe were not fine-tuned for life, then human beings wouldn't be around to observe it. So therefore it requires no explanation....

Hmmmmm sounds pretty weak to me.

Now Collins also mentions that spiritual skeptics try and use a metaphysical escape hatch for this fine-tuning and cosmological contant issue which so strongly points to a creator. The escape hatch is to presume that multiple universes exist, therefore lowering the odds and making it seem less of a miracle that we so happen to be lucky enough to exist. However, the multi-verse theory is only a theory and there is NO evidence to suggest that they exist and there IS no way of proving it.

Lot's of good information in this chapter. And once again Strobel is not wary of aggressively questioning his interview subjects. He wants answers because he wants truth!

[Annella]

The glorious feeling you have during worship and praise.  The way your spirit quickens when they read the Word before the preacher brings it forth

This hope that I have, the world didn't give it to me
This joy that I have, the world didn't give it to me
This love that I have, the world didn't give it to me
This Word that I have, the world didn't give it to me
This God that I have, the world didn't give Him to me
The world didn't give it and the world can't take it away

I am more than just confidant in the existence of God. I am in love with Him. I have never felt so in love with Him than I am now. Now that I know and am beginning to understand how AMAZING a God He is that He could create
Such a vast and beautiful universe in which He lovingly created for me. My feet are planted in the Word and I won't be moved by the thrashing and violent storm of deception that attempts to uproot me.

Shernajwine, you made me cry tears of joy.  Our love for Him is eternal.  He is real and alive forever more!

[shernajwine]

Ok, for anyone reading this thread with interest, this book has 11 chapters. I'm actually further along reading than what I have posted so far but my son had surgery so I haven't been able to stay online as much. I have another book after this one that I'm going to read called Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds by Phillip E. Johnson.

Let me know if after this book is summarized here if you would like me to start another thread in the same form, for the next book. 

[shernajwine]

Chapter 7

This chapter has a subtle yet very impactful message.

In this chapter Strobel is interviewing Guillermo Gonzalez PHD who graduated summa *bleep* laude with degrees in astronomy and physics from the University of Arizona and later earned his master's degree and doctorate in astronomy from the University of Washington at Seattle. And Jay Wesely Richards PHD who holds three advanced degrees in philosophy and theology, including a doctorate from Princeton Theological Seminary. Together they authored a book called The Privileged Planet.

This chapter is longer than the previous ones and they get into some pretty deep and meaty details that I won't be able to do justice to within a mere summary.

The chapter starts out making a statement that has been a common belief among astrologists and other areas of science but is being unraveled and found false. The statement is that, there is nothing special about earth, nothing unique about our sun and nothing out of the ordinary about our galaxy.....earth is "a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark"-Carl Sagan

This belief is based on the Principle of Mediocrity or the Copernican Principle. Copernicus's discovery that the sun didn't revolve around the earth but the earth revolved around the sun seems to have demoted humankind from a privileged space in the universe.

Now in the next few pages these two learned men go through a brief history that is detailed but explain how The Copernican system, far from demoting man, destroyed Aristotle's vision of the earth as a kind of cosmic sink, and if it did anything, it elevated humanity. (You would have to read the entire passage to get entire jist of that and how they explain it)

But to summarize the chapter as a whole Gonzalez and Richards explain with logical reasoning how life is nearly impossible if not entirely possible anywhere else in the universe. Based on what we know about the laws of physics and biological structures, we can determine that earth is perfectly situated to sustain life and have biological systems flourish. Everything about our planet is unique to supporting life.

Strobel mentioned how science fiction speculates about extra-terrestrial life that's built in a radically different form-for instance creatures based on silicon instead of carbon.

Gonzalez says it won't work. He insists "Chemistry is one of the better understood areas of science.  We know that you just can't get certain atoms to stick together in sufficient number and complexity to give you large molecules like carbon can. Silicon falls far short of carbon."

They discuss the "safe zone" in which our planet revolves around the sun....a zone is that narrow and how we are perfectly positioned. How our distance from the sun, the moon and its size and distance, the surrounding planets that protect us from asteroids, the circular orbit.....all of this creates a space optimal for life to flourish. There is two pages devoted to describing how incredible the sun is and how it is unique.....it is just the right mass, emits just the right colors a balance of red and blue, it's metal rich and has a higher abundance of heavy elements compared to other stars of its age in this region of the galaxy. Its metallicity may be near the golden mean for building Earth size habitable terrestrial planets.

It talks about plate tectonics which is unique to earth and how it is necessary to support life.

Then they talk about how we are placed optimally to discover the universe. "Over and over again, the extraordinary conditions that create a hospitable environment on Earth also happen to make our planet strangely well-suited for viewing, analyzing and understanding the universe."

Gonzalez concludes " the universe was designed for observers living in places where they can make scientific discoveries.."
Richards adds "Christians have always believed that God testifies to his existence through the book of nature and the book of Scripture. In the nineteenth century, science effectively closed the book of nature.  But now, new scientific discoveries are reopening it."

[Annella]

I must dive back into Strobel's writings again.  It's been a while, and your postings have made me want to go through it again.  Need to invest in the whole set of DVD's and books.  Our church has them in the library for anyone to check out, but I want my own set.

Keep posting, it's great.

[lancenweman1978]

Chapter 7

This chapter has a subtle yet very impactful message

This sounds like it is right up my alley. What is the name of the book please. Thanks

 

[Annella]

Lee Strobel wrote 4 books so far:

A Case For a Creator (this is the one shernajwine is posting on)
A Case For Christ
A Case For Faith
A Case For the Real Jesus (have not read this one yet).

There are also DVD's that coincide with these books.

[shernajwine]

I actually have a book coming in the mail that is another one by Lee Strobel called Inside the Mind of the Unchurched Harry and Mary.

It is a book that I think will help me personally as I am confronted by non believers and will help me better understand their reasoning. I am excited to read it. I will probably have several more books on the way but I won't try to put them all in the forum lol that would be overload!!

[shernajwine]

This sounds like it is right up my alley. What is the name of the book please. Thanks

As Annella stated, the book I am summarizing on in this thread is Case for a Creator; but the people interviewed in the chapter 7 of this book authored a book called The Privileged Planet, which would go into more details than are stated in the interview. So if this particular issue talked about in chapter 7 interests you, I would recommend the book the speakers wrote. 

[Annella]

I actually have a book coming in the mail that is another one by Lee Strobel called Inside the Mind of the Unchurched Harry and Mary.

It is a book that I think will help me personally as I am confronted by non believers and will help me better understand their reasoning. I am excited to read it. I will probably have several more books on the way but I won't try to put them all in the forum lol that would be overload!!

I need to review his writings and what he has out there now.  Inside the Mind of the Unchurched sounds like something I'd like to read also.  I travel a lot and would like to take some of his books along with.

[shernajwine]

Chapter 8

This chapter is in interview with Michael Behe PHD who received a degree in chemistry with honors from Drexel University and a doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of the book "Darwin's Black Box"

The interview starts off with Behe explaining the title of his book."black box" is a term scientists use when describing a system or machine that they find interesting but they don't know how it works. He uses a computer as an example of being a black box for most people. We use it, we type on the keyboard we process documents but most of us have no clue how a computer actually works. To Darwin, the cell, was a black box.

Behe's concept of irreducible complexity is compared to a mouse trap. The comparison says that the particular mouse trap in this example cannot function without all it's parts and neither can the cell. So Behe's premise is that "evolution can't produce an irreducibly complex biological machine suddenly, all at once, because it's much too complicated. The odds against that would be prohibitive. And you can't produce it directly by numerous, successive, slight modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor system would be missing a part and consequently couldn't function. There would be no reason for it to exist. And natural selection chooses systems that are already working"

For those interested here is a youtube video I found some time ago that gives you detailed information on what Behe is talking about. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3-6gFBpXdM

Now as always anytime a legitimate argument is presented in favor of creation, evolutionists will try and debunk it with outrageous claims. Strobel brings up arguments from the evolutionists side to disprove the irreducible complexity concept. Behe addresses them all with confidence and easy to understand illustrations of his points.

There are a number of youtube videos featuring Behe defending his concept and his book with sound logic and showing the evolutionists weak arguments for the ridiculous over reaching that they are.

Behe says, "Scientists propose hypotheses all the time.  No big deal.  But if I say, 'I don't think natural selection is the driving force for the development of life; I think it was intelligent design,' people don't just disagree; many of them jump up and down and get red in the face.  When you talk to them about it, invariably they're not excited because they disagree with the science; it's because they see the extra-scientific implications of intelligent design and they don't like where it's leading."

[shernajwine]

Chapter 9

Strobel goes back to interview Stephen C. Meyer again.  This time he wants to discuss DNA.

Meyer has written extensively on the implications of the information in DNA and Strobel wants to find out if there any naturalistic processes that can account for the appearance of biological data in the earliest cells.

Meyer likens the DNA to a library. DNA is encoded with chemical characters A,G,C,and T. Different arrangement of characters yields different sequences of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. So comparing the DNA to a library he says "The organism accesses the information that it needs from DNA so it can build some of its critical components."

So the idea of this chapter is Meyer is describing the fact that DNA is full of information. Now if you can't explain where the information comes from, you haven't explained life, because it's the information that makes the molecules into something that actually functions.

Nowhere in our world do we find information that wasn't the result of intelligence. Books, computers, mathematical equations...anything that has information in it was produced by intelligence. Yet evolutionists would have you believe that the incredible amount of information and the incredibly complex biological data inside of every single cell was produced by natural processes.

He uses the example of hiking on a mountain and coming across some rocks spelling out "Welcome Stephen", now these rocks are clearly relaying information. Do we suppose that the wind knocked around the rocks until they accidentally spelled out something that is able to be related through information processing? Well, it's possible extremely improbable but it would be considered a miracle of a sort because the chances of the wind producing translatable information ...well the odds are outrageous! So what about his brother who was hiking in front of him...could he have placed the rocks in such a manner that would spell out a greeting for the one behind him?? Well, to an evolutionist he would say....intelligence couldn't possibly have formed those rocks in that pattern. (you see where this example is going   )

Then they discuss the prebiotic soup of early earth. Darwin speculated that life may have originated when a protein compound was chemically formed...in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc. present.

Meyer says, there is no evidence that this "soup" ever existed. He said there would have been a lot of nitrogen in this soup because it would have been rich in amino acids and amino acids are nitrogenous. So in examining the earliest sediments of earth they should find large deposits of nitrogen rich minerals......never been found.

Interestingly enough Meyer states in the next section entitled "Random Chance" ...that "Virtually all origin-of-life experts have utterly rejected that approach"
Yet it is still alive at the popular level. Meyer says that the first molecule would have had to have a certain level of protein folding in order to perform a function....the odds of a molecule forming by chance in the exact way it needs to to be functional is 1 chance in 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000." And that would be only ONE protein molecule--a minimally complex cell would need between three hundred and five hundred protein molecules!!!! Plus, all of this would have to be accomplished in a mere 100 million years, which is the approximate window of time between the earth cooling and the first micro fossils we've found." "To suggest chance against those odds is really to invoke a naturalistic miracle. It's a confession of ignorance. It's another way of saying 'We don't know' ".

There is a lot more in this chapter that is mind boggling in regards to the awesome complexity in DNA and Meyers effectively debunks all evolutionist arguments.

Ok, I just found a series on youtube that kind of does what I'm doing here in summarizing this book. Here is a portion of that series dealing with this particular chapter.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CamNoA6Cfjc&feature=related

[lancenweman1978]

Chapter 9
Strobel goes back to interview Stephen C. Meyer again.  This time he wants to discuss DNA.

It is difficult for me to find the discipline and energy to NOT comment/add on all this. I spend endless hours discussing these exact topics and dozens of others.

It seems completely illogical to say that a few atoms came together to form the exact molecules/particles that allowed for "life" to begin not as to say it is impossible though. Too many permutations: even with millions/billions of years for one permutation to eventually have the necessary components/qualities that would allow for evolving of it aside from all the other permutations happening with other atoms/particles/molecules.  How about all the inexplicable coincidences just in our galaxy let alone all the other billions.

I personally believe evolution is true simply because I know I have evolved from my youth into a far more complex being: mentally, physically, emotionally etc. not to mention at length-  from ancient egyptians or early pigmys/myans etc. To believe it all happened from a few atoms is just too much for any intelligent, humble, focused, driven, curious human to accept as truth. The only people I see believing either possibility and only that possibility are usually closed minded, fearful, angry, confused, unaware and over-privileged sad excuse for humans who are usually the worst offenders for not choosing to seek out what they believe is true but to simply randomly choose and defend those beliefs at all costs and selfishly without the whole of other possibilities in mind. Seems sad and pitiful to me to live an entire life like that. Maybe a few years early on before our minds really have lived and expanded enough to really comprehend multi-faceted conversations such as these and doing so without extreme emotion.

It seems logical that both exist to some extent: that is a supreme being/beings either flat out created us or guided our evolution into what we know today: humans/humanoids/homosapiens - and that we have evolved and will keep evolving (or at least I hope because it seems we have tipped and now are devolving as a whole >< ) into a more complex, compassionate, aware etc etc beings.

Some days I seriously doubt a higher power exists because of the significant disappointment they would have in us since day 1 and still allow for us to exist here; but then again we are only here for a measly 100 years or so and in the grand of eternity this time here isn't even measurable it is so short, so what may seem big and extreme to us now may one day be only but a spec in our journey as energy/spirits etc. and is completely relative to what it is that we know only here with what is in front of us.

With all the energy we expend on all of this lets not forget to actually get out there and make this ball of dirt we live on a little better each day. We must remember those that came before us put some serious foot to *bleep* to allow for us to have the freedom to sit around lazily discussing these things and not having to worry of tanks rolling down the streets or our government being overthrown or some extreme such as those. Any person that can read, focus and understand on all of this has a serious advantage over most others as we can handle living exceedingly complex lives and implement far-reaching change. So I'll consider this a discussion/contribution thread for the advancement of life for those that choose to do so and my contribution will be very, very easy. Go rent a few movies or the more challenging way get the books for 1. Blue Gold 2. Earth 2100 3. The Jensen Project 4. The Next Industrial Revolution 5. The Secret 6. What the #*$&% Do We know (probably the best film of all time). All of those combine 1 very simple and easy point: be aware of how your decisions effect/affect yourself and others. Quite simple really.

So in short I believe that if I put my 2 cents in it will show support for those of you who choose to or want to get into the infinite possibilities such as these and show you too feel that it is about discussing the possibilities and not just believing in one. It shows you keep an open mind to existing and new information. Who knows what future information/technology/study will reveal to us.

Thanks for making this thread as I will read at least 1 of the books mentioned here since I enjoy the mental stimulation and faith/hope that somewhere else people are discussing these same subjects. After seeing all the hate, anger, confusion, human trafficking, drug abuse, physical-mental-emotional abuse, greed, fear etc it is nice to know there are a few who have chosen to allow themselves to evolve into arguably better life forms. It does set a great example and gives strength to others often times without us even knowing it.