The Importance of the Abraham Explosion

The concept of the Abraham Explosion…borrowing the word explosion from the Cambrian Explosion to describe the similar phenomenon…in the moral reasoning realm…of a sudden, quantum-jump influx of information via the novel, unprecedented life-script for Abraham…may seem like a stretch…but only if one discounts the value of biblical faith.

Obviously, the physical body-plan architectures of the incredibly novel and complex creatures of the Cambrian Explosion…Opabinia, Marrella, Wiwaxia, Hallucigenia, Anomalocaris, and Trilobite…have no correlation to salvation through grace by faith…other than that the information packages of both of these explosive events fall outside of humanistic invention or control.

The Cambrian geologic period predates us by 530 million years…so we cannot claim credit for the creation of complex life on earth.

And has been argued throughout this book…biblical faith is unimaginable through humanistic reasoning…and therefore falls outside of human literary invention.

The relative importance of the inauguration of physical life on earth, beginning with the introduction of single cell bacteria around 3.8 billion years ago and accelerating with the sudden appearance of complex creatures at the Precambrian/Cambrian boundary at 530 million years ago…compared to the sudden introduction of salvation through grace by faith starting with Abraham around 4,200 years ago…can be weighed in the relative balance scales of time in that one inaugurated temporary physical life…while the second inaugurated eternal spiritual life (Ex. 3:6; Mt. 22:32).

If we value the biblical faith component of every narrative story of faith in the Bible…that God can and will displace our normative worldly plans with His higher plans for our lives if we will walk with Him in faith…a novel and innovative concept so far outside of worldly conventional thinking that no human writer would ever invent it…then what occurred when Abraham obeyed God in taking his family and all of his possessions in a journey of faith from Haran to Canaan…truly merits the term of the Abraham Explosion. aran to

I sense in this one single topic that I have stumbled upon the equivalent invention of the paper-clip or sliced bread…in the area of Christian apologetics…so important are the implications.

Standard within orthodox Christian thinking today is the commonly held idea that God has a plan for our lives.  I would guess that there are many magazine articles and books written on this subject…along with the accompanying important scriptural admonition to take up our cross and to follow Jesus.

But what I perceive is missing in all of this is the connection of the cross of Christ (Lk. 22:42)…integral within each narrative story of faith in the Bible…that authenticates and validates the extremely high worth of these biblical stories of faith…that in some Christian circles has dropped to the dangerously low-value level of being considered myth or fiction…as a result of the skeptical past three or four century’s incessant anti-supernatural bias in philosophy and science…which has seeped into and established a foothold within Christendom.

The reality is that this anti-supernatural bias has been debunked for over four or five decades now, and is no longer a tenable worldview from a philosophical standpoint.

Because the Big Bang is the first moment of the initiation of mathematics, physics, and chemistry into being in the physical universe…in a split-second accompanying the introduction of material particles and energy…in unfathomable quantities and precision…the notion of an intelligent designer inserting His free-will, creative agency into the natural world…can no longer plausibly be considered a violation of the those very same laws of nature…since they both came into being at precisely the same time and from the same source…intelligent agency.

The arguments for atheism are damaged and being eroded on a daily basis as new programs of complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information are being discovered and understood in science…which are otherwise inexplicable in the now outdated, Darwinian model of gradual evolution in small incremental steps through genetic mutation and natural selection.

This same quality of guided-to-an-end-point, premeditated information coming from an intelligent agency…God…can be seen in the biblical narrative stories of faith.

Everything we might want to do in our lives…as a practical matter…will not fit within one lifetime.

If God is going to be able to successfully insert His higher ways into our lives in the form of a coherent and functional God-composed life-script…then something else will have to give way.

In order to make the space for the new higher program of God to actualize…then some or all of our own horizontally conventional plans and aspirations will have to go.

This is what we see in the biblical journeys of faith.  This is the dangerous peril to our own autonomous individualism and sovereign will-and-way…within worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…that is purposely and by design under threat of displacement when in the presence of a biblical-quality journey of faith.

This is the innovative feature of the influx of new information that occurred in the God-composed adventure of faith life-script for Abraham…that puts it on an equal or greater footing with the Cambrian Explosion.

When combined with the concept of a vertical graph-line spectrum of goodness and light…with absolute good and brilliant pure light at the top…and decreasing goodness and light descending down the scale…with the novel and ingeniously innovative concept embedded in the biblical narrative stories of faith that God’s ways will displace our ways within an adventure of faith life-script…this authenticates and validates the high worth and value of these biblical narrative stories of faith.

The recognition of the mere existence of complex information…outside of and above humanistic invention…in Abraham’s calling to go from the city of Haran to the land of Canaan…essentially displaces Abraham’s otherwise normative aspirations…that would have been actualized in some manner or another within the Haran reality.

With a challenging journey of faith across the gap…from where Abraham starts to where he finishes as the “father of faith”…to millions upon millions of people following down the succeeding centuries in pursuit of crossing this same gap through biblical faith in their own God-composed journeys of faith…this argues compellingly for the divine origin of the Bible in the same manner as the Cambrian Explosion argues for an intelligent designer introducing the design information that produces the sudden appearance of new and highly complex life-forms.

From A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity.