Tag: Time

Is and Out—Abraham the Father of Faith

            One contention I want to make in this book is that the biblical narrative stories of faith, starting with the detailed life-script of Abraham, are roughly 3,500 years ahead of modern science in recognizing this subtle dichotomy between the status quo “is” of studying the material world, and the abstract ideal of what “ought” to be as applied to the destiny and direction of a human life-script.

            One of the main themes of the biblical narrative stories of faith is that as Abraham travels south towards Canaan, God’s new life-script for Abraham displaces whatever Abraham might otherwise have done, living in the city of Haran.

            Fundamental to eternal reality, Abraham could never have closed the gap between the “is” and the “ought” of becoming the father of faith, through a humanistic approach of self-reliant, worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

            The concept of the God of the Bible displacing our ways with His higher ways and thoughts, to close the gap between an “is” and an “ought,” cannot by definition exist within the self-reliant, “I did it my way” approach of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

            The revolutionary concept starting with the life-script of Abraham is that God-sovereignty is unimaginatively superior to self-sovereignty, inserting the discernment of a divinely better moral compass that is unattainable through worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

            The constrained optimization in the engineering of a fulfilled human life, had a targeted trajectory towards the ideal end-point “ought” of my optimum destiny living in Christ, starting at the beginning point “is” of being lost and directionless in my unredeemed, fallen nature at the time of my Christian conversion. 

This is the epitome of well-defined purpose.

The Dichotomy of “Is” and “Ought,” is Present Today at the Outer Edge of the Universe.

            As the universe expanded outward following the Hot Big Bang explosion out of nothing previously material, the circular bubble internally containing all of the laws of physics, chemistry, and mathematics including the fourth dimension of time, and all of the materials in the Periodic Table of fundamental particles, along with all of the information that would comprise the organized complexity within that expanding bubble…has always been tangentially connected to the timeless, physically immaterial nothingness (the eternal God of the Bible is a non-material, self-existent Spirit-Being)…located at the outer edge of the still expanding universe.

            If we could travel to and catch-up with the expanding envelope of the universe, we could observe the current transition-line between the “is” of the timeless, nothing-physically-material, existing before and since the Big Bang beginning of the universe 13.7-billion years ago, and the expanding interior of the universe containing all of the incredible realities of time, matter, and energy that exhibit and define the “ought” of either a purposeless or a purposeful universe, the question that modern mankind is attempting to answer.

            A fundamental truism to try to comprehend here, is that as the presently expanding universe pushes outward its leading boundary-edge, there exists the most profound demarcation-line between absolutely nothing timely or material outside the universe, and absolutely everything material inside the universe including everything non-materially conceptual in the form of abstract ideas, intellectual and moral reasoning, animal instinct, and the fourth dimension of time.

            At the outer edge of this universe exists as stark a contrast between an “is” and an “ought,” as is imaginable.

            The “is” of a non-spatial reality containing nothing material exists just outside the bubble of the universe, and the “ought” of absolutely everything exists just inside this line separating nothing physically material with everything physically material.

            Modern mankind now has the empirical database of facts garnered through the Scientific Revolution to make an informed decision of how an “is” of nothing physically material could become the “ought” of this remarkable universe we inhabit and study.

            From the Christian viewpoint, the “is” to “ought” journeys from Abraham to Paul in the biblical narrative stories of faith, bears an uncanny similarity to the same journey of an expanding material universe out of nothing previously material, pushing outward the boundary-line between nothing physically material from everything physically material.

            From the Christian viewpoint, this is unmistakable evidence for the existence of the non-deistic, fully engaged, intelligent designing agent God of the Bible.

            This is a reality that no purely naturalistic explanation can plausibly traverse.

This is an excerpt form my book Pondering Our World: Christian Essays on Science and Faith.

Taking Things Too Much for Granted as We Look Backwards from an Orderly World

            One example of badly missing the big-picture as limited by an atheistic worldview, is to not recognize and factor-in the need for agency to overcome the difficulties in terms of directionally targeted trajectories and prior fitness, that the beginning Hot Big Bang is an explosion. 

            The fundamental question is not just how does something come out of nothing, but more precisely and profoundly how does something explode out of nothing.

            The more knowledgeable and informed question today is how does matter and energy explode out of nothing previously being non-material into physically existent matter and energy.

            If our materialistic, agency-excluding worldview requires that self-assembling matter and energy produced the orderliness and intelligibility we observe today in the natural world, how does non-existent matter and energy explode into existing matter and energy at the beginning of the physical universe? 

Explosions do not create intelligible order, but instead create chaotic disorder.

            We only see order coming out of the Big Bang by looking backwards in hindsight from the vantage point of the perfected order we observe today in the natural world.

            I live one street away from the Pacific Ocean in Southern California.  Today I am enjoying a clear blue sky, a moderate summer temperature, and a cooling, slight sea breeze.

            It is easy for me to take this for granted, having never lived farther than a mile from the beaches in Southern California.

            But how many factors must align and be properly sequenced to go from a massive explosion at the Big Bang origin of the universe, to a post-card perfect day along the beach in Southern California?

            Science correctly prides itself in saying that it questions and examines everything analytically without prejudice, that it digs deeper than surface appearances, and that it bases its conclusions and axioms on empirical, fact-based evidences.

            But the atheism in scientific materialism cannot crossover into contemplating the intelligent designing agency that is required to span the enormous gulf of 13.7 billion years from a beginning Hot Big Bang explosion, by definition being a chaotic event, to arrive at the pleasantness of a clear sunny day along a beach in Southern California.

            The number, coordination, and integration of the factors that must be fine-tuned to an inconceivable fit and function outcome of a beautiful sunny sky and pleasant weather at the beach, corresponding to our ability to appreciate this, defies any plausible explanation that leaves God out of the process. 

            From our current viewpoint looking backwards in time it is easy to take for granted, that of course order arose out of the Big Bang explosion 13.7-billion years ago, because today we observe orderliness actualized in the natural world, that otherwise should be entirely counterintuitive originating out of a massive explosion.

            From the time of the Big Bang looking forward, to arrive at the orderliness and intelligibility of the natural world today is asking too much of a random, undirected, accidental, and chance-based, purely materialistic process.

            A massive explosion in a book publishing, printing press factory will not generate a dictionary.

            A tornado going through a junkyard will not assemble a 747 commercial jetliner.

            Italian spaghetti sauce will not make itself.

            The old example that 100 monkeys sitting at typewriters randomly banging on the keys for years would eventually by chance alone produce a Shakespeare play, is a bad analogy because 100 monkeys are not the same thing as starting from scratch with absolutely nothing.[1]

            Monkeys have the physical body-parts and dexterity to perform random typing, and typewriters are highly engineered and sophisticated instruments for communication.

            Time plus chance here is invalid even if successful because the experiment is rigged upfront to propel forward in a certain direction having the built-in means to communicate information.

            100 monkeys in a group all talking for a trillion years cannot possibly produce a Shakespeare play because spoken monkey-talk cannot reach the level of information understandable by humans that a typewriter might possibly generate (unless humans devise a way to translate monkey-talk into English).

            What should be an obvious fallacy in this analogy to monkeys by sheer chance typing Shakespeare is that we are starting with things that are already extremely complex.

            How difficult would it be to create a monkey from scratch capable of being trained to hit typewriter keys?

            The typewriter, that a monkey would produce a Shakespeare play on, is an ingeniously complex invention.

            This is a fundamental point that needs more attention in the evolution/creation debate that starting from absolutely nothing is not the same thing as progressive development from the simple to the complex.

            This is especially true when the simple is not simple at all.

            This argument imagining a pathway through time and chance for Darwinian evolution starts by assuming as a given the existence of complex, highly specified, and coherently integrated entities like monkeys and typewriters.

            The real question is how to create a Shakespeare play starting with absolutely nothing.

            Chance cannot work with nothing.

            The concept of the Big Bang origin of the universe is that matter and energy materially arose out of nothing previously material…no monkeys and no typewriters in existence yet.

            The concept of the origin of life must start with the reality that DNA and the molecular nanotechnology inside the first living bacteria cell arose out of zero DNA, and no life previously existing on earth.

            In our normal experience, explosions do not produce the ordered complexity of coordinated things to the point of being discernable as such, to human investigation through science, like our universe amazingly is.

            But equally telling, explosions do not occur out of nothing.

            The late scientist Stephen Hawking can brilliantly investigate the origin of the universe through quantum mechanics, looking backwards through an intelligibly ordered, present-day reality.  

            This is all well and good, and scientists will continue this investigation.

            But the narrow focus of the atheism of scientific materialism precludes the fuller picture that would include the obvious question once we see it, of how a massive explosion at the beginning of the universe could over billions of years arrive at an end-point outcome in this 21st century of cognitive, thinking human scientists. 

These scientists explore the physically material universe, exploiting with great success this feature of orderliness and intelligibility, arising out of the chaotic disorder of a massive explosion.

            Another clear example of atheism blindly sweeping the obvious under the rug, once we see it, is the idea that extra-large stars are needed to condense in size and implode through gravity to produce the exceptionally high heat to make carbon and oxygen, just before exploding to spread these critical elements throughout the cosmos that are essential to enable complex life like ourselves to exist.

            The chemical bonding properties of the carbon atom are critical to form the numerous compounds that enable living organisms to exist, yet again a massive explosion of giant stars is required to translate over billions of years this physically material reality into living organisms on earth.

            The Big Bang creation of the universe is dated to 13.7-billion years ago, and the first appearance of life on earth is dated to around 3.8-billion years ago.

            Doing the math, this equates to a gap of time of nearly 10 billion years from the first existence of the material universe to the beginning of life on earth.

            What quality of targeted foresight, absent intelligent designing agency, would be capable of spanning this period of time to connect-the-dots beginning with carbon and oxygen created within exploding supernova stars, to arrive at exquisite end-points of function in the ten-million different species living on earth today exhibiting unique architectural body-plans and lifestyle habits?

            The common layman on the street would and does say as the majority opinion that these directionally targeted outcomes of complex, specified, and coherently integrated living organisms could not come about through random and undirected processes commencing with giant, supernova stars exploding 13-billion years ago.  

            I can easily recognize in this 21st century through the most general understanding of the various parts of my body, through a non-technical introspection of how precisely everything internally works, that I am vastly too complex to be the product of a mindless, blind, accidental, indifferent to outcomes, trial-and-error, and undirected process.

            Ask most people the same thing, and given a moment of reflection would agree that we are too complex and too highly specified in terms of function to be the product of a solely matter and energy universe.

            As stated in the introduction in this book, the more we learn about the phenomena in the natural world, the weaker becomes the argument for naturalistic materialism.

It is the philosophical element of atheism within scientific materialism that generates the outdated question: “Is there empirical evidence for the existence of God?”

            The correct answer is that of course there is no physically material evidence for the existence of the God of the Bible, because God is a non-material, Spirit-Being…but this is not the end of the story.

            The difficulty of assembling all of the various parts in the right amounts to create another duplicate planet Earth-2, again highlights the impracticality of physically material creatures like ourselves marshaling the required knowledge and practical means to put together a functional, life-sustaining planet.

            The difficulty of building a planet from scratch highlights the inescapable reality that a transcendent, non-material, Spirit-Being of unimaginable capacity would be needed to create our planet earth, unencumbered by the practical limitations of physical existence. 

            Provisional conclusions, that are abstract concepts attached to scientific research programs, can no more exclude divinely intelligent agency than they can support materialistic atheism as the only worldview acceptable to pure science.

            The inference to the best explanation today has only one option.

The creator of this universe has to be a non-material, Spirit-Being possessing the wherewithal to produce a physically material universe, massive sized galaxies, and exquisitely magnificent planets like our earth.

This is an excerpt from my book Pondering Our World: Christian Essays on Science and Faith.

[1] See the discussion of starting with truly nothing in The Science & Faith Podcast – James Tour & William Dembski: Information Theory, on the Internet, May 3, 2021 on DrJamesTour.

Timeless Foresight Needs Explaining 1

            Animal instinct in the natural living world does not possess, does not exhibit, timeless foresight.

            The reality of life is experienced in-the-moment for absolutely every living organism, including humans.

            A leopard on the African savanna plains resting comfortably in the noonday shade, hidden up underneath the canopy inside a large tree cannot thoughtfully plan several hours ahead-in-time until the evening sunset at 8 o’clock, when the leopard knows through timeless foresight that its unsuspecting prey a gazelle will conveniently stop to graze directly below this tree.

            A leopard does not possess timeless foresight. 

            Within the program of natural instinct, constrained and channeled into the narrow, forward march of time the leopard hunts its prey in-the-moment.

            Hypothetically, human beings possessing timeless foresight combined with the knowledge of good and evil, yet lacking a third component of absolute moral goodness, would potentially be perfectly successful criminals in being able to plan perfect robberies.

            One problem here is that the police would also possess the timeless foresight to be able to anticipate the robbery and take perfect steps to prevent it, when the future moment in time came.

            If humans possessed the timeless foresight of knowing in advance future outcomes, then gambling in casinos or at race tracks, entering into a civil lawsuit against another person, and reading a murder mystery book or a romance novel would no longer have purpose and meaning. 

            This is because the outcomes, the endings, would already be known ahead of time in advance.

            Lack of timeless foresight is one reason why we like reading murder mystery books, spy thrillers, and romance novels because we do not know the outcomes.

            But we can cheat, turn the pages to the end of the book, and take a sneak-peek at the story ending.  I confess I have done this sometimes, when the story is so full of suspense, I cannot wait to see how it will end.

            Motion pictures capture our attention for two hours in the movie theater because they condense the events of a larger story like The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars down into a two-hour long feature film. 

            This reduces the story down to as short a time-period as we can achieve yet still tell the full story.  A two-hour movie is typically as close to zero-duration timeless foresight as we can humanly produce.

            We have to watch the entire movie from start-to-finish for two hours because we do not possess the timeless foresight to be able to take-in the whole movie in a split-second flash of time.

            The same thing occurs in reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace over a six-week period (I am a slow reader).  The interest is generated, is artistically created by the book writer based upon the absolute certainty of the absence of timeless foresight of the book reader as long as the book is read from front to back without skipping ahead.

            Two things here we know for sure: that human beings do not possess divine timeless foresight, and that we do not possess absolute moral goodness.

            All three complimentary components: the knowledge of good and evil, timeless foresight, and absolute goodness must be in-place and functioning simultaneously for free-will, thinking life-forms like human beings to have lives that operate at the highest optimum level of perfection.

            The knowledge of good and evil, if only timeless foresight is added to the mix without the third component of absolute goodness, creates a nightmarish reality of competing multiple foresights good and evil in an exponentially broadened cat-and-mouse scope of interacting outcomes.  This would produce a complexity well beyond the cause/effect stability experienced in our current one-dimensional time trajectory.

            This would be a reality too complex to follow even in the classic television series The Twilight Zone.

            But absolute goodness without the independence of free-will choice inherent within the knowledge of good and evil, of not having the capacity to freely choose between the broad array of moral concepts, would produce the equally undesirable reality of human beings that are mere robots.

            The third possible option of having timeless foresight alone, without the knowledge of good and evil and without absolute moral goodness, would be a bizarre reality that is unimaginable.

            Yet curiously, human beings do clearly possess one of the legs of the three-legged stool, the knowledge of good and evil, without possessing either timeless foresight or absolute moral goodness.

            From the standpoint of illuminating biblical-quality faith, the fact that humans have the knowledge of good and evil eliminates the atheistic philosophy of naturalistic materialism from consideration as a plausible explanation for reality.

            Naturalistic materialism is eliminated from reality because of the dilemma of how and why a material causation alone could produce the incredible human possession of the knowledge of good and evil, without also including the components of timeless foresight and absolute moral goodness as complimentary to the knowledge of good and evil.

            Having one the three legs of the stool without the other two, points to deliberate, intentional design.  It does not point to random and mindless happenstance of trial-and-error.

            Of equal power arguing for intelligent design, is the fine-tuned moderation of time narrowly advancing in a one-dimensional direction forward, yet lacking the all-important feature of the foresight to be able to see ahead into the future. 

            Timeless foresight is of invaluable worth.

            Its curious absence from the reality of human existence points towards thoughtfully planned, scaled-back moderation that has brilliant intelligent design written all over it. 

            Darwinism assumes by definition zero intelligent design utilizing foresight. 

            Traditional Darwinian evolution allows absolutely no architectural and engineering design through premeditated forethought, because to allow design into the mix also invites a super-intelligent Designer God into human scientific investigation, which is anathema to the materialistic worldview.

            Yet the one and only area in human experience where we do exercise extremely accurate, pinpoint timeless foresight is in the design and assembly of complex systems. 

            We exercise timeless foresight in manufactured products like hybrid cars, computer software applications, the construction of commercial buildings and residential houses, and in storyline scripts for movies, television, and fiction and non-fiction books, for examples.

            People are by nature prolific intelligent designers and can see ahead in time to visualize the final outcomes of human created things.

            How does this square with Darwin’s tree-of-life based upon common descent linked by an unbroken hypothetical chain of ancestors, when in-the-moment animal instinct shows no signs whatsoever of being able to go beyond the strict limitations of time? 

            Animal instinct shows no capacity to step-up into the cognitive, creative freedom of timeless foresight to envision future, inventive productions.

            Bee hives, beaver dams, and spider webs are produced by instinct and not by deliberative, free-thinking, flexibly creative contemplation.

            This reality between thought and instinct creates a huge gap between human beings and the rest of the natural living world, a gap that is unbridgeable by materialistic processes, by any stretch of the imagination.

            Human beings can design and manufacture an automobile, a physically tangible thing, that functionally operates for years and for hundreds of thousands of miles of driving, using the future-looking vision of timeless foresight and foreknowledge.

            But a young man and woman getting married at age 20 cannot see ten or twenty years ahead into the future, of either the husband or the wife or both entering into extra-marital affairs, sadly and tragically ending the marriage. 

            We cannot foresee our kids going off to college and falling-in with the wrong crowd, becoming addicted to alcohol or drugs.

            We cannot see into our future the contracting of a deadly disease that takes our life before reaching the age of 40 or 50.

            There is an old axiom that applies here: “If we don’t know where we are going then any road will take us there.”

            We know precisely where we want to go when we design an automobile, a new house, or a computer software application.  We know where we want to go when we start-out to write a murder mystery, biography, or technical book because we can visualize a rough outline in our mind’s-eye, in the creative area inside our heads.  

            But the capacity for timeless foresight for human beings stops at a certain point. 

            This is something that argues for the participation of an intelligent designer God and for the over-the-top brilliance of creative imagination in terms of intent and impact in the targeted, moderated, purpose-driven crafting of the dimension of time in service to mankind.

            Time as we currently know it creates the singularly unique context for the exploration and discovery of a fuller understanding of good and evil, which would not be possible if the other two legs of the three-legged stool were added of timeless foresight and absolute goodness.

            I do not think an answer to the question of why God cannot create human beings who possess divine timeless foresight and foreknowledge, and possess the divine attribute of absolute moral perfection, exists in this present world. 

            This might involve the impossibly unachievable goal of creating billions of junior-level divine gods, like the impossibility of creating square circles, or one-ended sticks, or married bachelors, or making two-plus-two equal five.

            But only premeditated intention, the thoughtful choice-making between multiple possible realities of intelligently guided moderation could produce something as well-defined and having a targeted function as precise as time.

            Trial-and-error, hit-and-miss, accidental dumb-luck, fall-into-place on its own, or some form of directional self-assembly could not plausibly be the explanation for the fine-tuned essence of time.

            Time is an intelligently designed thing, a created reality for a definite purpose.

%d bloggers like this: