Creation: Part IV
Honesty on the lips of an evangelical Christian, agnostic, atheist, deist, or theist is to be all alike admired. A diamond is a diamond even if found in a rock pile. So truth is truth regardless of the source. Often if a person speaks a truth on one subject a critic will try to find some counter statement by that person to negate the comment. One quote from an individual does not infer an endorsement of all of that person’s philosophy.
The concept of origins is controversial. Renowned persons and/or great scientists of various persuasions have offered their opinions on origins. Pursuing a minor is biology in a state university I reached a conclusion regarding origins. I then compared that conclusion with the Bible and found them very compatible.
Years later I found a far greater mind who felt the same. Robert Jastrow, an objective agnostic and founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, wrote, “Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same…”
Wernher von Braun, one of the fathers of our space program, commented, “I find it as difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science. And there is certainly no scientific reason why God cannot retain the same relevance in our modern world that He held before we began probing His creation with telescope, cyclotron, and space vehicles.”
In “The Consolation of Philosophy,” Anicus Manlius Sevrinus Boethius, postulated: “This universe would never have been suitably put together into one form from such various and opposite parts, unless there were some One who joined such different parts together, and when joined, the very variety of their natures, so discordant among themselves, would break their harmony and tear them asunder unless the One held together what is woven together into one whole. Such a fixed order of nature could not continue its course, could not develop motions taking such various directions in place, time operation, space, and attributes, unless there were One who, being immutable, had the disposal of these various changes. And this cause of their remaining fixed and their moving, I call God, according to the name familiar to all.”
Reliable scientific facts have led these and millions of others to such conclusions.
Robert Jastrow, in his book “God and the Astronomers,” observed: “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
Persons wanting to broaden their horizon on the subject will enjoy such works as “Darwin’s Nemesis” and “Darwin on Trial” by Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson. Scientific minds will enjoy the challenge of reading “The Design Inference” by William A. Dembski and published by Cambridge University Press.