The premeditated, planned-in-advance, moderated appearances of the resurrected Jesus do not overflow beyond this well-defined boundary-line of faith and trust in another person…in this case faith in Jesus Christ the Son of God…expanded into a universally larger appearance to everyone in Jerusalem…which would then have turned His resurrection into the entirely different zone of being objectively observed empirical fact…of being an impersonal acknowledgment of an otherwise obvious, ordinary fact…like the daily appearance of the noonday sun…conferring no positive spiritual and moral status to professing faith in Jesus Christ…and not being the starting point for entering into a journey of faith following God’s lead.
The grand purpose of this universe and our existence in it…is to discover the character of God through the experience of a personal relationship.
This is part of the elevated capacity that humans possess…of the natural world being orderly and intelligible to us…and equally amazing and privileged to also be able to comprehend God as revealed to us through God-composed journey of faith life-scripts…as patterned in the biblical narrative stories of faith…starting with the life of Abraham…that can be actualized in our lives as well.
The personal, relational aspects of faith and trust in another person…cannot be reduced to material constituents.
Relational faith in another person cannot be placed in a test-tube and heated-up to observe its characteristics. Personal, relational faith in another person cannot be cooled-down to the temperature it freezes…to determine when it becomes a solid.
After 160 years of intensive scientific research into the creation/evolution debate…the present conclusion is that this incredibly brilliant and insightful investigation conducted by human beings…revealing our highest qualities for intellectual pursuit of truth and our inner moral guidance for honesty in our evaluation of the evidence that we have discovered…reaches a divinely intended philosophical impasse in the study of biological life…and an impasse in the search for answers to the questions of the source of origin of the fundamental reality of who or what is behind it all…as God knew in-advance this would happen in 1859 when macroevolution was first introduced…in a convincing way into the marketplace of ideas.
This leads us to the point of recognizing and acknowledging the surprising presence of this elevated part of the fundamental reality…the delicate balance between belief and unbelief…taking its place alongside the orderliness and intelligibility of the natural world to human beings…both of which are in actuality part of the answers to the questions we seek.
Only the Creator God could and would initiate the fundamental reality of the delicate balance between belief and unbelief…producing the fine-tuned, philosophical stalemate between the two opposing worldviews of creation or evolution…the worldview of creationism based upon giving God the benefit-of-the-doubt to pick-up our cross and follow Him by faith into our created destinies…or the worldview of evolution that limits this worldly experience to autonomous individualism…the hallmark of the philosophy of humanism…relying entirely upon ourselves as junior gods sitting upon the thrones of our lives…according to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
This is one of the starting premises of Christians as we view the fields of human scientific research…which in and of itself makes a compelling argument for a reality that transcends above anything that could be produced through the blind and mindless mechanism of materialism.
The natural world belongs equally to everyone…and the orderliness and intelligibility of the natural world…to humans…invites Christians who are scientists, philosophers, and laymen to accept the open invitation to investigate the natural world…God being confident…as its Creator…of our finding ample evidence of complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information…that reveal an Intelligent Designer of incredible engineering skills and unsurpassed artistic judgment…in fashioning this environment for life on earth.
On the other side of the coin of the delicate balance between belief and unbelief…macroevolution hits the wall of not being able to progress beyond this delicate balance…because it cannot achieve a completely decisive, empirically objective victory…because it is an untruth…a false narrative…that cannot cross the finish-line of scientific fact-based evidence…unlike other proven fields of scientific research.
The few simple arguments I present at the beginning of this essay…are not like the arguments against the notion that the earth revolves around the sun…debated controversially from Copernicus to Newton…based on two incorrect ideas that wind should be blowing at around 1,000 miles per hour (the 25,000 mile circumference of the earth spinning at one full revolution per a 24-hour day)…and that people should fall-off the surface of the earth at the upside-down, bottom-end of the earth’s rotation.
The hundreds of trillions of unique cell types in a fully grown African elephant is a scientific fact. The question at the fundamental reality level is what is the source-of-origin of the complex, specified, and coherently integrated information that locates each of these cells in their correct location…and tells them their unique function?
The contention of naturalistic materialism that Mother Nature is capable of performing this…merely creates another man-invented god…materialistic in nature…that could not…nor ever would invade the sacrosanct self-sovereignty of our autonomous individualism.
The obvious fact that all of the unique cell types in our bodies grow together as a coordinated whole-unit…from human adolescence to mature adulthood…does not need the confirmation from science to establish this as scientific fact-based evidence.
Again, the question at the level of the fundament reality…is who or what is the source-of-origin that is capable of coordinating this inconceivably complex communication network…operating flawlessly and free of assembly-line “bugs.”
These and tens, hundreds, or thousands of similar exceptions …to the notion that the blind and mindless naturalism of Mother Nature could step-up into the shoes of being the creative cause behind the vast diversity of life…stops cold the otherwise brilliantly hypothetical extrapolation of Charles Darwin from microevolution extended into macroevolution…at the hard demarcation-line of the delicate balance between belief and unbelief…the zone in which Darwinian evolution can proceed no farther in terms of empirical evidence or worldview philosophy.
Finally, if God is perfect…if He is incapable of bias, error, or bad judgment…and we were created in His image…then we have intrinsic worth and value that is not the case at all in the program of naturalistic materialism.
We cannot have value to an entity that is blind, mindless, indifferent, and uncaring.
If the purpose of our existence in the universe is to experience a journey of faith in order to discover the true character of God (Gen. 3:1-5) through a personal relationship…it is because of a starting-point of our intrinsic value and worth to God.
This is one of the key through-lines running in all of the biblical narrative stories of faith.
The Cross in the Christian Life 