 Recently I began to study the human brain by reading a number of different articles written by experts who have been studying the brain for decades. The information that they gave was nothing less than astounding. In fact some of it is so huge that it almost defies imagination. In the midst of my reading and study I came upon how evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins said our brains came into being. What amazed me is how, in the end, Dawkins wanted me to believe him rather than God. Let me share a little bit of it with you.
Our brain is somewhere between 3 and 3.5 lbs as an adult. It easily fits into a gallon jar with plenty of room to spare. Yet, Cambridge Physicist Roger Penrose said the following about the brain, “What’s in our head is orders of magnitude more complex than anything one sees in the Universe: "If you look at the entire physical cosmos our brains are a tiny, tiny part of it. But they're the most perfectly organized part. Compared to the complexity of a brain, a galaxy is just an inert lump." Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist at the City College of New York made this comment on the brain. “The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.” Professor of Computational Neuroscience at MIT Sebastung Seung has commented that the human brain contains 100 billion neurons and 10,000 times as many connections. By the way the number of neurons in the brain is about the number of stars that are in the entire Milky Way galaxy. Other Neruoscience experts list the number of connections called synapses at about 40,000 connections. Either way, the complexity of the human brain is astounding! If this is not enough to blow your mind – the way that our body communicates with the brain is by sending electrical impulses along these neural highways throughout our bodies. Some of these impulses we actually see, feel, hear, taste, or touch, but other messages are constantly being sent without our conscious knowledge of them in what is called our sympathetic nervous system. This is how our heart, lungs, and all our major organs work. It is how all the systems of our body connect and function with incredible accuracy to keep us healthy from moment to moment. The typical neuron fires from 5 to 50 times a second. So in a minute’s time your brain fires off somewhere near 30 to 300 trillion electrical messages within itself or the rest of the body. If you are feeling a little “nerve-tired” – by the end of a typical day your brain has fired off 43 to 430 quadrillion electrical messages to keep you alive and free from pain and doing things that would damage yourself. Imagine a set of highways 100 billion miles long with just over 400 quadrillion cars travelling over them every 24 hours. This is honestly beyond our ability to conceptualize. But then realize that many of these cars are travelling in excess of 200 miles per hour. Oh, and one other thing – all the cars are reaching their desired destination without any accidents or mishaps. Sheesh! This is what is happening in your brain and the rest of your body each and every day. We can now see why these scientists say that the human brain is the most complex thing in the entire known universe. Yet, the person who holds to an evolutionary understanding of origins says that all this was not designed. It happened over billions of years completely by accident – with no intelligence behind it and no designer responsible for it. Some may think I’m being a little harsh on the evolutionist – but let me give you a quote from Richard Dawkins on how he has come to believe these things happened – based on scientific reason alone. Dawkins, the famed Oxford evolutionary biologist reflecting on the sheer wonder of the emergence of life on Earth and the evolutionary process in his classic The Ancestor's Tale said this: “The fact that life evolved out of literally nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved literally out of nothing -is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice. And even that is not the end of the matter. Not only did evolution happen: it eventually led to beings capable of comprehending the process by which they comprehend it." To say that Dawkins statement is scientific - is laughable. Take a moment to consider that a supposed genius scientist has just said that both life and the universe evolved out of “literally nothing,” almost 10 billion years ago. Dawkins also holds that no designer or intelligence was involved. So then, how do we take that statement into a scientific laboratory and test its thesis? First, we’d have to have no intelligence involved in doing the scientific test. Then we’d have to add to no intelligence, no elements whatsoever as well as no where to have them be. So there we sit – not thinking with nothing before us and nowhere for it to happen. THEN – boom (they tend to prefer bang – big bang actually) right before us would be the proof of our thesis – a complete universe in which we can now have a laboratory develop. Then while waiting a few billion years longer, exercising no intelligence in working with whatever it was that big banged itself into existence, life would emerge in complex systems that function due to incredibly complex information systems that perfectly replicate themselves. Then these simpler one-celled versions of totally accidental organization and information centers that replicate themselves, without any intelligence and quite by total accident would (over a few more billion years) become a human being. This human being (ignoring all other systems within the human body) would have within itself (once again quite by total accident and random chance) have a brain that functions to communicate with over 100 billion nerve cells that are highly organized and set (accidentally of course) to stretch over an entire body so that in a days time 430 quadrillion electrical messages can be communicated without any errors in any of their communications. Um,yeah – sure. Dawkins tells us that trying to describe how all this happened literally out of nothing – with no intelligence guiding it – no pattern which it followed – and ending in the most complex thing in the entire universe – he says that trying to describe that with words would be injustice filled with madness. Please – don’t be scared away from this ridiculous statement. Dawkins is saying the same thing Scripture says, kind of. Here is what the Scripture says, “By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible. Hebrews 11:3 (NASB) By faith we believe that all we see and all that is was created by God as He spoke it out of literally nothing. But Dawkins modifies it this way – by faith in science and what he says it is a fact that the universe evolved out of literally nothing. Since he cannot ever prove this in any scientific laboratory or in any way that would come near the scientific method, we are left with this. By FAITH in what Dawkins says (and he won’t say it because it would be madness to try to say it with any justice to how staggering to the mind it is) the world was made out of literally nothing. Stop and think about those two statements. Both argue for a world created out of literally nothing. One claims God did it. The other claims no one did it – but we should believe him when he tells us this – even though he has absolutely no proof that this is how it happened. At least none based on that it came from literally nothing – because for him to prove this as fact he would have to have something and someone to do it. So our brains came from literally nothing and no one. When we put it that way – yes, it is madness to think this way. It is ridiculousness to the highest degree. It is ridiculousness for Dawkins to tell us as Christians that we are idiots for believing by faith God made the world out of nothing by His Word – all the while holding to a view that nobody using “literally nothing” made it instead. Oh – and you know why we should accept this? Because Dawkins has said it. Seems to me that we are moving from God speaking it into existence with His Word – to Dawkins speaking it into existence with his. Forgive me – but I think I’ll stick with God over Dawkins – especially when both are basically saying the same thing. Oh, and one other thing. I’ll also stick with God since His Word reminds me of the following truth. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. Romans 1:18-23 (NASB)
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 Awe and wonder . . . two words that perfectly fit any view of God. But in a world that thinks too highly of itself, populated with fallen people who seriously think too highly of themselves, awe and wonder do not describe the average response to God, Who has revealed Himself to us in Scripture - and His creation. And if I were to be completely honest (which hurts as I admit to my own sin of pride and over-aggrandizement of myself personally - and humanity corporately) I do not respond to Him nearly enough with the kind of awe and wonder that He deserves. At times I sing songs about His greatness with little more than yawning excitement - and even more sinfully - with a sense of wanting to get on with it so I can move on to other things more exciting to me. In an age where we make much of man - and even more of ourselves - the whole concept of being lost in wonder and awe of God is dangerously waning. And please understand I speak not of the world at large - but of those of us in the church.
There are two words that should show up often in our vocabulary when seeking to give any kind of description of God. The first of these words is the word "awe." We speak of things that, when we see them or experience them leave us awe-struck. That means the shear magnitude and majsety of them render us speechless because we are not sure there are words adequate to describe what we are seeing or experiencing. God, being both infinite and eternal, should be One who leaves us utterly speechless because His majestry and limitless magnitude are beyond human words or concepts. That is where we reach back to get our second word, "wonder." When I looked up wonder at Dictionary.com, the following definition began to take shape in my mind. Wonder means to be filled with admiration, amazement, or awe. This sense of wonder often illicits surprise, astonishment, and in some cases worship or adoration of what has caused our wonder. The God Who has revealed Himself in the Old and New Testaments - and Who is also revealed in what He has created, is a God Who can fill our hearts and our minds with both awe and wonder. There is no way to adequately define or describe Who God is. One way that we can touch the fringe of His boundless, infinite magnitude is by looking at nature - most specifically - the heavens. Since the discovery of the telescope, we've enjoyed a view of the heavens that expands as quickly as we can upgrade the ability of our telescopes to see further and further into space. The information below was originally printed in John MacArthur's commentary on the book of Matthew. "The more man delves into the universe, the more amazing and awesome the wonder of creation becomes. Telescopes can take us some four billion light years—about twenty-five sextillion miles—into space, and yet we have not come near the edge of the universe. We have discovered certain gravitational principles that keep the stars and planets in their orbits, yet we are far from fully explaining those principles, much less duplicating them. The earth spins on its axis at a thousand miles an hour at the equator, travels in a five-hundred-eighty-million-mile orbit around the sun at about a thousand miles a minute, and, with the rest of its solar system, careens through space at an even faster speed in an orbit that would take billions of years to complete. The energy of the sun has been estimated to be equivalent to five-hundred-million-million-billion horsepower. There are at least one-hundred-thousand-million other suns in our galaxy, most of them larger than ours." (John MacArthur, Commentary on Mark) What is even more amazing to me after reading that again, is that MacArthur's statement is just a small paragraph, because there is enough to know about our universe to fill an entire library of books. That is after we've spent 100's of years looking into space. The truth is our knowledge of the universe is ridiculously limited at the present time. If we had instruments and ships that could take us far out into the universe (even into our own galaxy to be honest) our knowledge would grow exponentially! To give you a perspective on how much we should be in awe and wonder of the God who created our universe, allow me to focus on one star within it. Granted, at the moment (due to our lack of a telescope powerful enough to see it) it is the largest star we know. Nevertheless, let's talk about the star Sirius, or Canus Majoris. This largest of all stars known was most recently measured at around 1500 solar radii. If you were like me, you had no idea what a solar radii was. It is the measurement of how big our sun is. That measurement is approximately 432,450 miles (to go from the outer edge of the sun to its center). If you want to know how far it is around our sun - that would be approximately 2.72 million miles (quite a walk - and take sunblock over 50 because you might get a sunburn!) Just our sun is so huge that it blows the mind to comprehend its size. But we speak of Sirius (Canus Majoris) which is now approximately 1500 times the size of our sun. Now I know that you are tired from that recent walk around the sun (and a little burnt probably) but you need to suck it up - because now we're going to walk around Sirius - which would be 4.1 billion miles give or take a mile or two. Forgive me for using this comparison - but it will give you a little better grasp of how large this star is. Imagine our earth is a basketball. Compared to our sun earth is a little smaller than a popcorn seed. In order to get something as large as Canis Major you would have to have a ball that is over half the size of the Empire State Building. Let me put that into perspective for you. That height is larger than the full height of the Superdome. So we are talking about a ball bigger than the Superdome itself (try jumping high enough to dumk that sucker into a basketball rim that can fit it!). Another way of describing the size of Sirius is that if we put it into our solar system (starting at the center of our sun) its outer edge would reach beyond the orbit of Saturn (although some think it extends beyond that to about the orbit of Jupiter). That is HUGE! But . . . this is only 1 star, albeit the largest one on record to date. There are trillions times trillions more stars in our universe - all of which have been placed in orbital movements that conicide with each other with greater precision than that of a well choreographed ballet. It truly is incredulous to an infinite degree how men can think this is all a random cosmic accident! I've taken all this time - and verbiage - to hopefully get you to stand in awe and wonder of a single star - in a galaxy filled with billions and billions of starts - which is in the midst of millions of other galaxies - all moving in such synchronization that we set our clocks by its movement. God created all this by His infinite power and wisdom. He did it so that they would proclaim the glory of His great name! Thus this mere creation of the genius and limitless strength of our God is itself infinitely inferior to Him - the One who spoke it into existence. It required no over-exertion on His part and its creation was no drain on either His intelligence or His might. He is beyond its existence and could as easily consume it entirely with one additional word spoken to utter remove it to little more than an afterthought flying quickly through our minds. So please . . . the next time you consider the God of your salvation - the God of creation - the God of eternal, timeless existence and infinite, measureless magnitude . . . do so with awe and wonder . . . oh, and a little reverence might be in order too (just as an infinitely understated suggestion). And one other thing . . . this coming Sunday when you meet with the saints to sing of the God of your salvation - remember Sirius, Canus Majoris - or by its common name, "The Big Dog!" When you do - and you also meditate on the fact that God created this giant ex-nihilo (meaning out of nothing) as He spoke the world into existence (By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible. Hebrews 11:3, NASB), we will be moved by His Spirit and the truth to sing and worship Him with both awe and wonder! Or, in a euphamism more familiar to our current age, "Let the 'big dawg' speak, and when you feel him - get crunk as you worship God off the hinges." (Yes, I know that just exposed me as a really old white guy trying to look cool - sorry, couldn't help it with the star being named, "the big dog.")  Greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. May the Lord grant that your identity is firmly rooted in the fact that you are made in the image of God. May that truth, along with the fact that Jesus Christ died for your sins be all you need to know that you are worth infinitely more than our culture could ever offer you in its petty ways of establishing identity and worth.
Ours is a culture that is obsessed with the idea of self-image. We labor constantly to make sure that our children – and indeed even adults – feel like they are worth something. Rather than base our view of ourselves on sound biblical footing, we’ve decided instead to manufacture worth for human beings out of thin air. The reason I say this is because the view of origins of those who seem to be consumed with giving people self-worth is more often evolutionary theory. That very theory makes it clear that there is no inherent meaning or purpose for our lives. We are just the latest in a series of very lucky accidents that have lead to our current state. What I find somewhat funny is that those who hold to this view of our origin give themselves to a frantic effort to make people feel like their identity is something truly special. In keeping with this frenzied search for meaning I bring up a New York Times article entitled, “How Young is Too Young for a Digital Presence?” by Molly Wood. Much of the article is spent debating how young is too young to allow your child to participate in facebook, Twitter, Instagram and every other digital social network. But what is fascinating to me is Ms. Wood’s final paragraph in which she comments on our children’s need for such a historical digital presence. Her comments are not intended to encourage us to allow our children to participate in these social networks, but rather speaks of how we do need to make sure that they are represented on them by our own posting. Let me quote her last paragraph to help you see the ridiculousness of her statement. “if anything a child today who grows up and discovers that he has no photos on facebook or Instagram, might think of himself as an unloved anomaly. In an age of obsessive digital detailing if a child grows up unrecorded what is his identity at all?” Evidently to be absent from social networking is to have no identity whatsoever - what a horror! Please understand that I enjoy seeing pictures of my granddaughter Emily on facebook just like any other proud grandfather would. But to think that her identity would be wrapped up in how many posts were made on her behalf is utter silliness. What about the child who grows up in a poor home where these things could not be afforded? Are they an unloved anomaly? Are they identity-less phantoms who must spend the rest of their lives wondering if they have any meaningful existence? This is nothing more than the continued efforts of a society that is slowly losing their ability to reason. Having rejected God as creator, we desperately search for something . . . anything that can make us feel like we have value. Yet, searching for this in an online presence is little more than a fool’s errand where our true worth is measured in little more than how many pictures – how many “likes” – and how many reposts we can garner for ourselves. This kind of self-obsessed existence gives rise to a generation where we bury ourselves in our electronic devices – rarely looking up for any kind of real interaction with the person who is sitting across from us at a table. And to actually look even further up – seeing the glory of God in creation and realizing that if God made us we have ultimate meaning and purpose – well, that is just crazy talk. Let me encourage you to do something for your children. Take time to talk to them – personally – not by text. Take time to affirm them as something more than an electronic signature going out into the electronic ether desperately searching for one more “thumbs up” to make them feel loved. Let them know that they are the special creation of God. Tell them God knit them together in their mother’s womb – and knew all their days, even before one of them came to pass. Let them know that God loves them with an everlasting love. They are not made in the image of Mark Zuckerman (thank God!) or little more than a Twitter in the night. Tell them they are made in the image of God Himself and were made to fellowship with Him and know Him. Let them know that they are seen as more than a brief flicker of pixels on an instagram – that they were graven on the hands of God’s very Son as He gave His life for them. Inform them that their lives are not measured by how often they are found on Vine, but rather that their live because by God’s glorious grace they have been grafted into THE VINE. Reject this goofiness that glorifies one’s digital presence as the end-all be-all of their purpose and identity. They are more than the sum total of their flashes of electronic 1’s and 0’s. They are made in the image of God – redeemed by the blood of the Son – and given life by the very Spirit of God Himself. That, dear saints, is how to help your child know that they have, not only an identity that will last until your hard drive dies, but one that goes on for all eternity.  Divorce or Conscious Uncoupling?
Recently a new way of looking at marriage and how it ends has come boldly upon the scene. This old way of seeing marriages end was called divorce. It was and is a messy exercise as two people who pledged fidelity and a life-long commitment to each other break a covenant made before God and witnesses who came to support their union. Divorce is painful and involves both a sense of loss and a sense of failure. Promises were made – a covenant was made – and now it is being broken. Things seem wrong, because something has gone wrong. Some divorces are due to infidelity and adultery. Some divorces are due to abandonment. Some are due to two people who site irreconcilable differences. Some are simply due to one or both parties just not wanting to be married any longer – and wanting their freedom back to live and do as they want. But, as I said at the beginning of this article, a new wind of doctrine is blowing over the wreckage of couples across the world. This new wind offers us arguments on why this whole, “till death do us part” thing was never a good idea in the first place – especially for those of us who have evolved toward longer lives than our Paleolithic ancestors. This new wind of doctrine is called, “conscious uncoupling.” Conscious uncoupling is a term developed by Dr. Habib Sadeghi and Dr. Sherry Sami. These two postulate that the high divorce rate may be a mile marker in our evolutionary history. The problem may not be us – it may not be selfishness and self-centered thinking and actions. We may be just not responding properly to the evolutionary cycle we are in at this present time. They point us back to the evolutionary theory of the upper Paleolithic period, which supposedly takes us back to roughly 50,000 to 10,000 B.C. Life expectancy was under 50 for both men and women. Today life expectancey is 76 for men and 81 for women. What, you may wonder, does this have to do with the high levels of divorce (0ver 50% of all marriages end in divorce today) in our current day? Everything – according to the good doctors. You see, evolution has advanced greatly since the days of our Paleolithic grandparents. Marriage for a lifetime to them meant, at the most, 20 years. But due to our evolutionary advances in longevity – we are expecting marriages to last anywhere from 25 to 60 years. Sadeghi and Sami want us to see that we’ve not evolved in our view of marriage. Our longevity has evolved way past our marriage stability quotient (have no idea what that means – but it sounded really good didn’t it). That is where Conscious Uncoupling comes in to rescue us from our lack of evolutionary progress in views of marriage and relationships. We need to see that our evolutionary progress calls for a way to be in at least two to three strong relationships in a lifetime. The idea of “till death do us part” must evolve or perish as we move toward the eventual perfection that we seek (Even though there was no conscious force or individual that started evolution – we were just an amoeba that wanted more out of life – but honestly never knew why it did or any way to determine, beyond natural selection, why it even thought there was any morality involved. Actually, in light of this whole marriage mess – it might have been higher evolutionary thought to just embrace asexual reproduction as an amoeba, because you only have to get along with yourself – but I digress). Therefore Conscious Uncoupling is the answer to our lack of evolutionary progress in the area of relationships and marriage. In Conscious Uncoupling there is no blame game – no fault assigned. There is just the realization that we are “uncoupling.” We are now free to move on to meaningful relationship number 2 or 3. Geez, we may find that we are so far behind that we could have 8 to10 and be perfectly fine. This would be laughable if it were not being embraced by so many. Sadeghi and Sami even go so far as to compare our relationship issues to our evolution from being bugs to humans. Bugs have an exoskeleton that is outside its body and is rigid and unflexible. Humans evolved into an edoskeleton that is on the inside, which allows for wonderful flexibility. The lack of flexibility in bugs is why they did not eventually rule the earth – human edoskeletal flexibility is why we have risen above the bugs to rule the world. The leap our two scientists take from there is to postulate that if we become spiritually and relationally inflexible – by – oh, let’s say – holding marriage to be a lifelong covenant between and man and a woman – we too may become relationally extinct (Personally, I'm now terrified about a relationally-rigid comet or asteroid that will cause me and all other "marriage-rigid" people to become relationally extinct - sigh!). Their point is to say that the flexibility of conscious uncoupling will advance us greatly in the area of relationship evolution. In Sadeghi and Sami’s article and writings, the word marriage begins to give way to new terms like coupling and uncoupling (Houston we have a problem – sorry, sounded like NASA trying to dock the Space Shuttle). This is done for a reason. If there is no marriage – there can be no divorce. If we have coupled (which we can now, due to evolutionary extrapolation, do 2 to 3 times in our lifetime), then it is so less traumatic to just consciously uncouple. Sounds nice and neat doesn’t it. Be flexible – don’t be like a bug – you’ll only be left behind by the superior species which leaves inflexibility behind. Here we have radical worldview differences on display for all to see. Worldview begins with things like origins. Our view of origins matters – tremendously! Sadeghi and Sami see our origins coming from an evolutionary viewpoint. There was no creator – and as a result no real purpose for life, marriage, or anything else. There is only the relentless onward march of natural selection to weed out what is weak and reward what is strong. What comes across subtly (maybe not so subtly) in their writings is that traditional, lifelong-covenant oriented marriage is out. It is outmoded, out-dated, and evidently being out-sourced to a much more open view of relationships. Marriage is out and “coupling” is in! We either advance in relationship-evolution – or are left behind and crushed like the rigid marriage bugs we are. Here is the worldview according to God’s revelation of Himself. You and I, and our ancestors, were never Paleolithic – and given to tiny lifespans that are rising due to evolutionary wisdom and wonder. We were and are God’s creation. When God made us, we were innocent and not subject to death. When our first ancestors, Adam and Eve, chose to rebel against God’s command, we fell – and – we also died. We died spiritually instantly – and later experienced physical death as well. Things have been devolving ever since. As sin increased – things have gotten worse. Life expectancy for our early ancestors was longer than at present. They lived into the hundreds of years. For someone to have died when they were only 75 to 81 years old was tragic. As the years have progressed – our life expectancy has gone down – even if, in the short –term it has gained a little at various points in modern history. Relationships were instituted by God in Genesis 3, and consisted of marriage between one woman and one man. What God put together was never meant to be something man could separate due to convenience or some uncoupling instinct into which we've evolved. God’s intent was for them to selflessly give themselves to each other for life – maturing together and caring for each other in each and every stage of life – until death parted them. Our current mess in the area of marriage and family is not due to our being too rigid. It is due to our being too sinful and selfish. But mankind does not like such terms because they imply that there is an absolute right and wrong (something that also comes from one’s worldview as well) which extends even to relationships and marriage. We do not just couple and consciously uncouple. That would indicate that during the entire process we are still two people. God’s Word reveals that in marriage the two become one. Want to know why divorce hurts so badly? It is because the two, who have become one, are now tearing apart – not back into two, but tearing the one in half. The world may attempt to redefine marriage and divorce into their newest pet terms, Coupling and Conscious Uncoupling; but the reality of God’s sovereignty will remain – as will the fact that in marriage there are no longer two - but one. The pain of divorce will also be just as real as it has always been. We may change the words and even try to alter concepts – but the pain will still be there. The sense of failure in a relationship will still remain. That is because we are the creation of God – we are under the commandments of God – and we will still feel pain when we reject the purposes of God. One bright spot in all this though, is that we also have the grace of God in the gospel of Jesus Christ to put us back together when sin and rebellion have torn us apart. Maybe I’ll start calling that Conscious Redeeming. |
Biblical ArticlesMost of these articles are taken from the Calvary Courier, a weekly newsletter that is sent to the folks who attend Calvary Chapel Jonesboro. Due to the response to these articles, we've decided to print some of them which proved to be very helpful to God's people at the fellowship. 
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