God is...

Discussion in 'Religion and Spirituality' started by studentofthemarkets, Jul 3, 2021.

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  1. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in Him may have eternal life. John 3:14, 15


    The Old Testament passage in Numbers 21 provides strong evidence that God planned to send a Savior to save those who would look to Him to be saved. Those skeptics who think that Jesus or the message of His death as a sin substitute was invented by the early Christians need only to look into the Old Testament passages to find details of Jesus’ life, His ministry, and most importantly, His death as our sin bearer, as well as some hints to the resurrection.


    This verse and the Numbers 21 passage provide a very clear picture of why Jesus died and how to receive His gift of salvation for oneself. Below is an excerpt from an article that also explains this message clearly:

    https://africa.thegospelcoalition.org/podcasts/tgc-africa-podcast/bronze-snake/
    God’s People Repent and Live


    So that is the first thing, God judged the people. And because of his judgment, many individuals died. And the judgment was the snakes that God sent among them. In Numbers 21:7, “And the people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord and against you. Pray to the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.” So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. And if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.”

    Well, that’s where the story comes from. Moses prayed to God and God in a miraculous way enabled a situation where anyone who was bitten by these snakes would look at this snake that was put up on a pole by Moses. And consequently, the poison in his body was neutralised and the person would live. Now, that’s the Old Testament story. What does it mean for us today?

    The Lifted Saviour
    To appreciate that we go to John chapter 3. In John chapter 3 the Lord Jesus Christ tells us the significance of that account. John 3:13. The Bible says “No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven. The Son of Man. And as Moses lifted up the bronze snake in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in he may have eternal life.”


    In other words, there is a spiritual application to what took place in the days of Moses. And it is this: we have sinned against God. God has pronounced death upon us all, because of the sin of Adam and our own sin. However, as Moses lifted up the bronze snake in the desert, Jesus was lifted up on Calvary. He died our death so that we could now be forgiven. The challenge that comes to us today, therefore, is to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. When we believe in him, as the Bible itself tells us in that most famous verse. “Whoever believes in Him, should not perish, but instead have everlasting life.” God has so loved the world. That’s the good news. And that indeed is the application.

    Trusting in the Finished Work of Christ
    I’ll read that famous verse to you, John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” That’s the significance of that Old Testament event. It is this, that you deserve to perish in hell because of your sin. But another has been put there in your place, Jesus Christ. He has paid the full price for your sin. Just as the Israelites simply had to look up to that bronze snake in order not to die. You too, all you need to do is by faith trust in the finished work of Jesus Christ and you will be saved from hell.

    Well that’s the significance of that Old Testament event. I hope you have been helped to appreciate it from scripture itself in simply answering ‘what does scripture say?'”
     
    Last edited: Aug 14, 2021
    #41     Aug 14, 2021
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    #42     Aug 14, 2021
  3. userque

    userque

    Somehow,
    1) If auto parts just suddenly appear, out of nothingness. And,
    If a container suddenly appears, out of nothingness. And,
    If those parts somehow enter the container. And,
    If the container somehow starts shaking, and getting hit by lightening bolts, in liquid autopart soup, for trillions of years.
    You can end up with a car.

    That car will run on gas, and eventually produce male and female versions of other cars. Then those can make more cars by mating with each other.

    (Feel free to substitute biological parts etc. for auto parts etc.)

    Or,

    Somehow,
    2) There exists a supremely intelligent being.
    That planned and created the universe and life as we know it.

    To the atheist, point 1) is the most logical.

    [​IMG]

    For me, it is more logical to believe that an advance intelligence created our complex universe and the super complex 'life' in it; than to believe it could just appear out of nowhere, and a bolt of life can produce life, and time can make that life become complex.

    Both beliefs require accepting unexplained origins: God from unknown origins, or the universe from unknown origins.

    There's a lot more to why I believe, but the above is exhibit "A."

    What do you get when you shake these up for trillions of years:

    [​IMG]

    This:

    [​IMG]

    Superior beings observing/manipulating a creation or subject:

    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Aug 14, 2021
    #43     Aug 14, 2021
    studentofthemarkets likes this.
  4. Awesome post!! Thanks for sharing!!!!
     
    #44     Aug 14, 2021
    userque likes this.
  5. ph1l

    ph1l

    Genetic algorithms demonstrate random chaos can evolve into order. Your example seems to be a fallacy of composition.

    Here is another theory.:)
     
    #45     Aug 14, 2021
  6. userque

    userque

    If my example is a fallacy of composition, then the theory of evolution is also the same fallacy.

    Your fallacy is in assuming that the mechanism by which a computer program works, also applies to real matter, outside of the computer's memory etc. It is the fallacy of false equivalence.

    The randomness of organic soup, given infinite time, can replicate any physical sequence of the building blocks.

    But chaos can't invent a process, it can only produce physical variations of physical matter. Cell processes weren't floating around in the organic soup; and therefore, aren't a result of random chaos.

    After your very first cell-made-from-chaos formed with a cell membrane and nucleus, rna, dna, etc. formed, what made it 'decide' to divide, and when? What made cell housekeeping occur?

    These cells processes are, imo, likely coded into the building materials. Chaos could explain the build up of these materials, but it can't explain their apparent preprogramming. Who put the programming into the building blocks within the organic soup?

    A chaotic process (genetic programming) can produce any computer program (process) given time, BUT, someone had to define the programming language. The below article speaks to that dilemma (emphasis added).

    "Genes whisper. They amplify. They turn other genes on and off and make them louder, softer, even silent. They cause cascade effects, sending notes through the system that loop back, creating loops within loops. A living thing may be a constantly changing melody, orchestrated by its constantly changing parts."

    Again, genes appear to be preprogrammed. Assuming evolution stumbled upon a valid 'program' by jumbling the 'commands' for trillions of years. It can't explain who program the genes to do what they do.

    (The title below is misleading. Here's how they 'define' 'We Built:'
    "That’s how they built the thing: They started with a goat intestine bacterium, copied its chemistry, booted it up, and then, one by one, they looked at each and every gene and removed it. If the bacterium died, they put it back—it was necessary. If it wasn’t, out it went."):

    We Built the World’s Simplest Cell—but Dunno How It Works
    BYROBERT KRULWICH
    PUBLISHED APRIL 21, 2016
    • 7 MIN READ
    The idea was daring, radical—dangerous even. Is it possible to build a living organism from scratch that’s smaller, simpler, more bare bones than anything now alive? Can we out simplify nature itself and maybe get a peek at the raw machinery—nature’s secret formula—for the essence of life?

    We—you and I—are dense with working parts. A human cell has more than 20,000 genes, fruit flies 13,000, yeast cells 6,000. But if we look for the simplest creatures on the planet, we will find a wee bacterium that lives happily in the digestive tracts of cows and goats: Mycoplasma mycoides.

    It builds itself from a very modest blueprint—only 525 genes. It’s one of the simplest life-forms we’ve ever seen.

    The Big Dare
    So, suggested Craig Venter eight years ago, why not take the next step and try to engineer something even simpler? A new life-form with even fewer parts? Venter is perhaps biology’s most wily, most celebrated entrepreneur (famous for spurring the great race to build the human genome). He assembled an ace team of cell biologists and asked, If we put our minds to it, could we strip life so bare that we’d create a living, replicating creature with, say, only 500 genes? Or 400? Or 300? As Chubby Checker used to sing (while dancing the limbo years ago), “How lowwwww can you go?”

    Last month, we got an answer.

    On March 24, Venter and his team of scientists unveiled a man-made cell stripped down to—sound the trumpets!—473 genes. The simplest creature ever. They call it JCVI-syn3.0 (That’s the J. Craig Venter Institute, third try). It’s not Botticelli beautiful.

    says Venter.

    That’s how they built the thing: They started with a goat intestine bacterium, copied its chemistry, booted it up, and then, one by one, they looked at each and every gene and removed it. If the bacterium died, they put it back—it was necessary. If it wasn’t, out it went.

    But now, staring at the 473 survivors, weirdly, Venter’s team has no idea why it’s these genes? Why are they the ones necessary for life? (For this creature’s life, anyway.) What exactly are they doing? And the answer is … they don’t know.

    “It’s a very humbling set of experiments,” Venter says.

    It’s how much they don’t know that’s really shocking.

    Of the 473 genes, 324, or 68 percent, are clearly there for housekeeping. They make proteins, protect DNA, repair the cell’s membrane. The usual stuff.

    Roughly 32 percent of the whole, or 149 genes, have no known function. “We don’t know what they provide or why they are essential for life,” Venter told Ira Flatow on PRI’s Science Friday.

    Some of of “the Unknowns”—about 70—look structurally familiar. A gene might look, say, like it transports something in or out of the cell but, “What we don’t know is what does it actually transport,” Venter says. His team can fiddle with the cell’s environment to see if the transporters are still needed. There are trial-and-error ways to figure out what some of these genes do.

    But then come the Total Unknowns—the black holes.

    The 79 Mysteries
    There are 79 genes in this group that no one has seen before. “We don’t know what they do,” Venter says. “That’s probably the most important finding,” he told Science Friday, “and it’s frustrating, it’s humbling … ”

    When they began this project, Venter’s team imagined that after years and years spent comparing human genomes, mouse genomes, fruitfly genomes, yeast genomes, and plant genomes, biology had a working script for what produces life. They thought they knew the basic parts—or most of them. But the truth is, they didn’t.

    “The scientific community has been basically suffering from the delusion that we did know all of biology,” Venter says. “We’re truly like aliens from another planet trying … to work out what these parts do.”

    Even more humbling, these “unknown” genes have been doing what they do for millions of years (or, as the biologists say, they’ve been “conserved” by evolution) for some important reason.

    So how could we not recognize them? How could the simplest life-form ever be one-third unknown?

    There’s something about the essence of life we’ve missed, thinks Venter.

    Perhaps, he says, life isn’t built from independent parts, like something in a machine shop. Maybe you can’t take a bunch of well-known genes, clamp them together, each one doing its own thing, and then, when you tighten the last screw, suddenly—SHAZAAAM!—a new creature sparks into being. Instead of focusing on genes, maybe we should consider the whole operating system—not the genes but the “genome,” a functioning whole.

    Life may not be machine-like. We may be orchestral.

    Genes whisper. They amplify. They turn other genes on and off and make them louder, softer, even silent. They cause cascade effects, sending notes through the system that loop back, creating loops within loops. A living thing may be a constantly changing melody, orchestrated by its constantly changing parts.

    For too long, Venter thinks, biologists concentrated on genes for this and genes for that. “We can’t just look at the function of a gene,” he says. What those 79 mysterious genes may be doing—some of them, anyway—is they may be pulling the parts together so they fit, compose, and hum themselves into being.

    How they do that may take us a while to figure out. Maybe a long while. Life, it seems, is darkly (richly?) complicated.
    <end quote>

    More: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/...e-worlds-simplest-cell-but-dunno-how-it-works
    __________________________________

    If it is easier for you to believe that all your complex eyes can see, is the result of randomness, so be it. I find it more logical to believe that what I see, is by design, and much too complex to have originated from randomness.

    I can't explain the origin of the creator. And you can't explain the origin of the universe/big-bang/precursor-to-the-big-bang/etc.

    After the origin mystery, my belief chalks life up to that intelligent being, yours relies on the random assembly of building blocks, without accounting for the apparent preprogramming these blocks contain. Mine can account for the apparent preprogramming.

    Don't get me wrong, I believe life can, and does, evolve. To what extent? I don't know. Can life evolve to a new species? I don't know.

    But I don't believe that life originated via evolution. Evolution may explain the physical assembly, but it can't explain the actions these genes take after they've been assembled.

    upload_2021-8-15_2-5-27.png

    "Why are you against atheism?

    I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. “I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe.” Period. It’s a declaration. But in science we don’t really do declarations. We say, “Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that.” And so an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?) But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about. “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” and all that. This positions me very much against all of the “New Atheist” guys—even though I want my message to be respectful of people’s beliefs and reasoning, which might be community-based, or dignity-based, and so on. And I think obviously the Templeton Foundation likes all of this, because this is part of an emerging conversation. It’s not just me; it’s also my colleague the astrophysicist Adam Frank, and a bunch of others, talking more and more about the relation between science and spirituality."

    More: https://www.scientificamerican.com/...cientific-method-prizewinning-physicist-says/
     
    #46     Aug 15, 2021
    studentofthemarkets likes this.
  7. stu

    stu

    1) or if a God just suddenly appeared, out of nothingness

    Feel free to substitute chalk for cheese. Really?

    There are key distinctions between auto parts and their natural surroundings. Otherwise auto parts would appear to be natural biological objects, no different from trees or rocks.

    The two things, auto parts and their biological surroundings being so completely unalike to each other, strongly suggests the more logical and reasonable conclusion would be that the surroundings are therefore not designed.


    For me, it is more rational to understand how the universe can and does do anything a God can do, but in addition and unlike any God, the universe is known to actually exist.

    To create a complex universe, a God would have to be even more complex than the universe itself.
    More realistic would be to see how life doesn't come from nothing, but is observed to evolve from simple to complex.
     
    #47     Aug 15, 2021
  8. From the video clip below, Origin: Probability of a Single Protein Forming by Chance

    Timothy Standish, Biologist, Geoscience Research Institute: “If we can appreciate exactly how hard it is to produce one molecular machine using nothing except atoms and energy, we can see that there is a profound problem, because once you have one molecular machine, you don’t have a living thing. These molecular machines need other molecular machines and even if nature was capable of producing all the molecular machines necessary that still wouldn’t be enough. They have to all be together all in this tiny little membrane bound space that we call a cell."


    Ann Gauger, Developmental Biologist, Biologic Institute: "From my understanding of what it takes to make a cell, it has to happen all at once. You can’t do it one bit at a time because everything works together in a causal loop. The higher level of organization transcends the pieces. The spatial organization in the cell requires that molecules end up in the right place at the right time. The DNA is copied into RNA. The polymerase that does the copying has to find the right spot in the DNA to start copying. The RNA has to somehow hook up with ribosomes which have to be in a particular place and the proteins then that are made have to be going to a particular place. That’s an awful lot to account for by random chance."


    Timothy Standish: "The probability that you would get them in the same space at the same time becomes beyond unimaginable and the probability that you would get them within a membrane inclusion, like a cell, is the next best thing to impossible."

     
    #48     Aug 15, 2021
    userque likes this.
  9. Now that it's clear that evolution can't be true, maybe you guys will all come to see that God must have created all things, we are a planet in rebellion, and need to take Him up on His kind offer of reconciliation.

     
    #49     Aug 15, 2021
  10. ph1l

    ph1l

    No, I gave an example of randomness evolving into order.

    It was something like this:):
    creating_life.gif
    But seriously, humans don't currently know exactly who or what started life or our universe.

    The ideas are the same. It's just that some people need to put a human-like face on it.
     
    #50     Aug 15, 2021
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