Introduction 2

From A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity

A final example for the purposes of this opening introduction…representing one small factoid…again amongst hundreds of thousands of similar everyday commonsense examples that could be persuasive evidence argued in a court of law…in favor of the necessity of an intelligent designer God…is the existence of our navel…our “belly button”…the umbilical cord between mother and baby that is severed and tied at childbirth.  Every human has one.

Is there a plausible series of sequential, gradualistic, random-chance events that would serve as an intermediate bridge between the first dysfunctional umbilical cord leading to immediate death of the human fetus at the very start of a materialistic creative progression…to cross the gap to a totally functional assemblage producing a viable fetus reaching the point in time of nine-month maturity and a healthy childbirth…whereupon the umbilical cord is cut-off from the placenta and tied into a knot?

Commonsense reasoning tells us that this one feature…amongst millions of other complex and tightly sequenced and integrated features in the human body…of a functional umbilical cord with all of its complex processes…must be up and running at just the right time in the embryonic development process of the human fetus occurring within the mother…for successful human reproduction to occur.

This requires intelligent design of the most sublime quality…not trial-and-error iterations having enumerable failures.

The quantity, quality, and the accuracy of the biological information codes and specifications…extrapolated out to every part of the human body to produce a functional living and reproducing organism having all of the features we possess…argues at the surface level of commonsense…for brilliantly intelligent design.

The steady advance of human scientific discovery has produced a deep and detailed understanding of how things work…in our own bodies such as how we produce speech, how we hear, and how we see…extended out into all of the areas of scientific inquiry from the microscopic atomic level to the galactic scale of the astrophysics of our universe.

This information content is now so vast…that a previous naturalistic explanation for the folding of amino acids into proteins did not even exist 100 years ago at the start of the twentieth century…because this area of microbiological knowledge had not even been discovered yet.

The current discoveries in science…with the new awareness of their accompanying explosion of information content…in highly complex and coherent systems…undermines all theories based on the simplistic methodologies of mindless, random chance, trial-and-error search strategies.

What could pass as an “explanation”…as a placeholder for ignorance 50 or 100 years ago under the guise of naturalistic philosophy posing as science…is now overwhelmed by the sheer volume and magnitude of complex and integrated systems of information that fall outside the chance probability of mathematics.

A naturalistic, Darwinian explanation for the complex phenomenon we now understand better in the living and non-living world…no longer “holds water” in this new Information Age.

As a non-scholar layman in the areas of theology and biblical studies…along with millions of other common Christians around the world simply following Jesus within their journeys of faith…I sense that the centuries-old paradigm conflict between philosophical atheism and Christianity is at a balanced apex…at a tipping-point where the evidences for theism may now begin…if they have not already…to surpass the now behind-the-times logic and arguments against supernaturalism and the miraculous in the Bible.

The Big Bang creation of the universe philosophically opened wide the door for intelligent agency…introducing in the first split-seconds of creation all of the natural laws of physics, chemistry, and mathematics… along with time itself…and all of the material particles in the right quantities and proportions to produce the universe we now observe today…out of absolute nothing…sometime around 13.7 billion years ago.

If an independent agent God can do this at the beginning of the universe…create something out of nothing…ex nihilo…along with the accompanying physical laws out of nothing…then the philosophical objection by skeptics that God cannot introduce creative life and “miracles” into the natural world…a natural world incorrectly viewed by some as a “closed system” up until a few decades ago…is now debunked by the discoveries of modern science through the identification of massive amounts of complex and functionally integrated systems of information…everywhere we look in the living and non-living natural world.

The concept of an independent agent…God…injecting vast amounts of complex information into our world utilizing creative foresight…such as the DNA code…the unimaginably brilliant folding of amino acids into proteins…and the body-plan architectural information stored somewhere in the embryonic developmental structure of the living cell that builds cells and tells them their unique function and location in the dividing and expanding embryo…is very similar to our own use of accumulated information and creative foresight in the planned and premeditated assembly of houses, automobiles, airplanes, laptop computers, and pharmaceutical medicines.

Daniel 12:10 tells us that skeptical unbelief will be with us in this world…all the way through the end-times.

Daniel 7:15-25 and 8:23-25 infer that the “mouth that spake very great things” (v. 7:20) will wear-out the best of the great Christian apologists…the saints of the most High…in the last days…taking the arguments as far as we can…until God steps in to decisively expose for all time the subtle and elusive deceptions of the “son of perdition” of 2 Thessalonians 2:3…in a way that we cannot currently foresee.

There is a delicate balance between belief and unbelief…must continue until the end of this present world.

Our part is to faithfully share the gospel message…and then let the Holy Spirit do His work of persuasion and conviction in the hearts and minds of people (Zech. 4:6).

The aim of this post is to make the argument for the importance of the biblical narrative stories of faith…under attack from many angles for hundreds of years.

This attack has successfully undermined for some modern-day Christians the recognition of the existence of the divine life-scripts that comprise these stories of faith…that could only be written by the same God who created our incredibly fine-tuned and information-rich universe.

The issues argued in this blog are among the most important in all of human history.

The integrity of the biblical narrative stories of faith means something.

If it can be shown that these biblical stories of faith could not come from human literary invention…but must have a divine origin of imagination and composition…this accomplishes two important things.

First, it restores the credibility of the participation of God in people’s lives.

Second, it again clarifies for Christians today the God endorsed and sanctioned route for Christians to impact our culture…as the light of the world…as pillars of the earth…in the supernatural way that God intended.

God-composed journey of faith life-scripts stand at the pinnacle…at the peak…of what is possible in human experience.  They exemplify the finest, best, and highest aspirations attainable in a human life.

Once Christians see the common through-line theme of the cross of Jesus Christ skillfully embedded within every biblical narrative story of faith…which could never have come out of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…this then clarifies what God is trying to pattern for us…in and through our own journeys of faith.

These plans of God were prophesied and articulated long ago through the prophet Jeremiah…of new covenant relationships between God and believers in which every Spirit-born person will personally know God from the least to the greatest (Jer. 31:31-34).