The steady advance of human scientific discovery has produced a deep and detailed understanding of how things work…in our own bodies…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 160 years ago…at the time of Darwin’s book The Origin of Species…because this area of amino acid behavior in living cell microbiology had not even been discovered yet.
The current discoveries in science…with the new awareness of their accompanying massive quantities of information content…in highly complex and coherently integrated systems…undermines all theories based on the simplistic methodologies of mindless, random chance, dumb-luck, trial-and-error search strategies.
What could pass…such as the incorrectly assumed simplicity of the living cell…as a placeholder for ignorance 160 years ago…is now overwhelmed by the sheer volume and magnitude of complex and integrated systems of information in the natural world…like DNA, RNA, and protein-assembly inside living cells…the serendipitous origin of which falls outside allowable, random-chance mathematic probability…as shown in scientific laboratory experiments.[1]
A 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 Christ within our unique journeys of faith…I sense that the centuries-old paradigm conflict between philosophical atheism and biblical 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 in favor of God as far as we can…until God Himself 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 in existence…for the time being…a delicate balance between belief and unbelief…discussed in detail in several locations in this book…which 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 brief arguments presented above in this Introduction are a part of the real truth about God…but as compelling as they are when flushed-out in detail…in my opinion only touch the surface…only nibble around the edges…of the real truth about God.
In my opinion…the real truth about God is revealed…in depth…in the biblical narrative stories of faith…from Enoch, Noah, and Abraham all the way through to Paul the apostle.
The core aim of this book is to make the argument for the importance of the biblical narrative stories of faith…under attack now for hundreds of years…from skeptics and critics of the Bible.
This attack has successfully undermined for some modern-day Christians…the credibility and relevance of the biblical narrative stories of faith for practical application to Christian discipleship today…thus partially diluting and neutralizing the benefits of a personal relationship with God…intended to actualize through a God-composed adventure of faith…after the pattern of the biblical narrative stories of faith…the heritage accessible to every new covenant believer today (Jer. 31:31-34).
That these worldly unconventional, biblical narrative stories of faith cannot plausibly be the creation of human literary, imaginative fiction…and must therefore have a divine origin…being timeless and relevant for mankind today…is the main theme of this book.
[1] Douglas Axe, Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed (New York: HarperOne, 2016): 57-59.
The Cross in the Christian Life 