Moving the Mountains: God of ONLY the Wondrous Acts
"In this world you will have trouble" John 16:33
That's a certainty, like there's day and night so there will be good and hard times. So then what informs our rather ignorant hope for complete comfort? I find our commonplace tendencies rather injudicious sometimes. Life is a journey; many things are likely to happen in its course: it's easy for us to speed through the clear sections in a highway, paying little attention to the surroundings. But when we hit a rough section or a grey area, we inevitably slow down.
- We pay more attention to what's happening around us; the beauty of the surroundings, the ever going dance of life.
- Our patience is put to test and we learn the importance of hope.
- We hone our problem solving skills –Experience is the best teacher, there's a lesson to be taken out of every situation, the toughest trials are our most potent lessons.
- We consider what's really important – what are we really rushing to? We start to relook Loves and spiritualism.
- We establish safety harnesses – as we ascend in our ladder of life, it is important that we do not burn our bridges; but the fact of life is that the stepping stones on our way up will not be so obliging on our way down; so it's important that you build safety harnesses to catch you in those instances when you free falling.
- We learn to remain calm even in the storms – there are no permanent situations, everything that has a beginning has an end. We are called to endure through our periods of trials with the peace and calmness of knowing that after the night dawn shall surely come. Do not expense off in excessive worrying or unnecessary struggle. You can waltz through a tough period with ease and peace. Pain only exists when there is a struggle – acceptance gives peace.
- We learn that ultimately some things are beyond our clout. Everything that comes into our lives is under the control of a sovereign God who has promised that "all things work out to the good of those who love Him and are called according to his purposes" Romans 8:2
- Our conscience is awakened to our cravings and clingings, which is the source of all our suffering and we learn to let go of our attachments.
Some of the world's most brilliant minds experience an unusual kind of hardship; Many, perhaps countless, questions hover at the frontlines of science for instance. In some cases, answers have eluded the best minds of our species for decades or even centuries, like Ebola or HIV aids. This brilliant minds call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of such incomprehension. It is at this point that they are humbled by their own ineptitude. They appeal to a higher power only when staring into the ocean of their own ignorance. Where they feel certain about their explanations however, God gets hardly a mention. Most scientists, particularly those concerned with the universe itself, invoke divinity only when they reach the boundaries of their understanding.
The six primary Planets are revolved about the Sun, in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. . . . But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. . . . This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.
In the absence of data, at the border between what he could explain and what he could only honor—the causes he could identify and those he could not—Newton rapturously invokes God:
Eternal and Infinite, Omnipotent and Omniscient; . . . he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. . . . We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion.
Plenty of scientists besides Newton have called on God—or the gods—wherever their comprehension fades to ignorance. Consider the second-century a.d. Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy. Armed with a description, but no real understanding, of what the planets were doing up there, he could not contain his religious fervor:
I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace, at my pleasure, the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch Earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.
Or consider the seventeenth-century Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, whose achievements include constructing the first working pendulum clock and discovering the rings of Saturn. In his charming book The Celestial Worlds Discovered, most of the opening chapter celebrates all that was then known of planetary orbits, shapes, and sizes, as well as the planets' relative brightness and presumed rockiness. God is absent from this discussion—even though a mere century earlier, before Newton's achievements, planetary orbits were supreme mysteries. The book brims with speculations about life in the solar system, and that's where Huygens raises questions to which he has no answer. That's where he mentions the biological conundrums of the day, such as the origin of life's complexity. And sure enough, because seventeenth-century physics was more advanced than seventeenth-century biology, Huygens invokes the hand of God only when he talks about biology:
But is it right to invoke God only when we hit an intellectual black out? Absolutely NOT! The fringes of our comprehension is not where God exists. God is glad to reveal himself even in ordinary everyday circumstances. Mr. Newton and a horde of his very intelligent friends only saw God at the edges of their comprehension? How intelligent? So what would happen if what they could only explain as an "Act of God" was to later be explained scientifically? The French astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace confronted Newton's dilemma of unstable orbits head-on. Rather than view the mysterious stability of the solar system as the unknowable work of God, Laplace declared it a scientific challenge. In his multipart masterpiece, Mécanique Céleste, the first volume of which appeared in 1798, Laplace demonstrates that the solar system is stable over periods of time longer than Newton could predict. To do so, Laplace pioneered a new kind of mathematics called perturbation theory, which enabled him to examine the cumulative effects of many small forces.
Which is the greater exclusion? God of the unexplained or No God at all? There's really not much difference. When the "unexplained" becomes the "explained and understood" where does that leave God? According to an oft-repeated account, when Laplace gave a copy of Mécanique Céleste to his physics-literate friend Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon asked him what role God played in the construction and regulation of the heavens. 'Sire,' Laplace replied, 'I have no need of that hypothesis'. Sounds familiar? An embellished contemporary statement goes something like: "Act of God" is only relevant in insurance claim forms. Clearly shows where we are increasingly choosing to place God.
"18the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth …… 19since what may be known about God is plain to them. 20For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse….. 22Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools…. 26Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. 27In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men…." Romans 1: 18-32
A pervasion against the recognition of God in the very essence of his natural creation leads to a strong pervasion on the morals of "wise" men and an absurd sense of right and wrong in the society. God surely is bound to be found at the end of our understanding, but he also is at its beginning; Paul points out in the first Chapter of his letter to the Romans that if we were honest with ourselves we really ought to recognize God and his qualities, power and significance from the world around us. He further asserts that this is true for believers and non-believers, Jews or gentiles, those under the law and those not under the law. You do not have to be Christian to see that there surely is God. We thank God that there is a breed of scientists that have seen the hand of God in the very fundamentals of science. Newton and a horde of other Scientists meet God at their points of non-comprehension. Another breed of scientists meets God at their point of understanding:
Intelligent Design – 
In what amounts to a stunning yet unheralded philosophical inversion, throngs of ecclesiastics and scholars began to declare that it was the laws of physics themselves that served as proof of the wisdom and power of God. One popular theme of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the clockwork universe—an ordered, rational, predictable mechanism fashioned and run by God and his physical laws. But do we need to put such emphasis on the intelligent proof of God? I think not: - God is a god of inference not intelligence; Trying to intellectually figure God out will always have its flaws; I do not think, in my personal opinion, that the theorem of intelligent design can pass thorough intelligent scrutiny mainly because of two reasons:
Not so orderly nor intelligent after all:
The early telescopes, which all relied on visible light, did little to undercut that image of an ordered system. The Moon revolved around Earth. Earth and other planets rotated on their axes and revolved around the Sun. The stars shone. The nebulae floated freely in space. Not until the nineteenth century was it evident that visible light is just one band of a broad spectrum of electromagnetic radiation—the band that human beings just happen to see. Infrared was discovered in 1800, ultraviolet in 1801, radio waves in 1888, X rays in 1895, and gamma rays in 1900. Decade by decade in the following century, new kinds of telescopes came into use, fitted with detectors that could see these formerly invisible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Now astrophysicists began to unmask the true character of the universe.
Turns out that some celestial bodies give off more light in the invisible bands of the spectrum than in the visible. And the invisible light picked up by the new telescopes showed that mayhem abounds in the cosmos: monstrous gamma-ray bursts, deadly pulsars, matter-crushing gravitational fields, matter-hungry black holes that flay their bloated stellar neighbors, newborn stars igniting within pockets of collapsing gas. And as our ordinary, optical telescopes got bigger and better, more mayhem emerged:
galaxies that collide and cannibalize each other, explosions of supermassive stars, chaotic stellar and planetary orbits. Our own cosmic neighborhood—the inner solar system—turned out to be a shooting gallery, full of rogue asteroids and comets that collide with planets from time to time. Occasionally they've even wiped out stupendous masses of Earth's flora and fauna. The evidence all points to the fact that we occupy not a well-mannered clockwork universe, but a destructive, violent, and hostile zoo.
Of course, Earth can be bad for your health too. On land, grizzly bears want to maul you; in the oceans, sharks want to eat you. Snowdrifts can freeze you, deserts dehydrate you, earthquakes bury you, volcanoes incinerate you. Viruses can infect you, parasites suck your vital fluids, cancers take over your body, congenital diseases force an early death. And even if you have the good luck to be healthy, a swarm of locusts could devour your crops, a tsunami could wash away your family, or a hurricane could blow apart your town. So the universe wants to kill us all. But let's ignore that complication for the moment.
But why confine ourselves to things too wondrous or intricate for us to understand, whose existence and attributes we then credit to a super intelligence? Instead, why not tally all those things whose design is so clunky, goofy, impractical, or unworkable that they reflect the absence of intelligence? Take the human form. We eat, drink, and breathe through the same hole in the head, and so, despite Henry J. Heimlich's eponymous maneuver, choking is the fourth leading cause of unintentional injury death. How about drowning, the fifth leading cause? Water covers almost three-quarters of Earth's surface, yet we are land creatures—submerge your head for just a few minutes, and you die.
Or take our collection of useless body parts. What good is the pinky toenail? How about the appendix, which stops functioning after childhood and thereafter serves only as the source of appendicitis? How about the silent killers? High blood pressure, colon cancer, and diabetes each cause tens of thousands of deaths every year, but it's possible not to know you're afflicted until your coroner tells you so. Wouldn't it be nice if we had built-in biogauges to warn us of such dangers well in advance? Even cheap cars, after all, have engine gauges.
The eye is often held up as a marvel of biological engineering. To the astrophysicist, though, it's only a so-so detector. A better one would be much more sensitive to dark things in the sky and to all the invisible parts of the spectrum. How much more breathtaking sunsets would be if we could see ultraviolet and infrared. How useful it would be if, at a glance, we could see every source of microwaves in the environment, or know which radio station transmitters were active. How helpful it would be if we could spot police radar detectors at night. Think how easy it would be to navigate an unfamiliar city if we, like birds, could always tell which way was north because of the magnetite in our heads. Think how much better off we'd be if we had gills as well as lungs, how much more productive if we had six arms instead of two. And if we had eight, we could safely drive a car while simultaneously talking on a cell phone, changing the radio station, applying makeup, sipping a drink, and scratching our left ear.
The question therefore is does intelligent design suffice as the absolute proof of God's existence? Stupid design could fuel a movement unto itself, aren't they also a creation of God? Why then should we focus only on the wondrous and amazing? Why do people seem to enjoy thinking that our bodies, our minds, and even our universe represent pinnacles of form and reason. Maybe it's a good antidepressant to think so.
Intelligent Ignorance
I don't know what this is. I don't know how it works. It's too complicated for me to figure out. It's too complicated for any human being to figure out. So it must be the product of a higher intelligence.
What do you do with that line of reasoning? Do you just cede the solving of problems to someone smarter than you, someone who's not even human? Do you tell students to pursue only questions with easy answers? There may be a limit to what the human mind can figure out about our universe. But how presumptuous it would be for me to claim that if I can't solve a problem, neither can any other person who has ever lived or who will ever be born. Science is a philosophy of discovery, Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem.
Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes. We know when and where they start. We know what drives them. We know what mitigates their destructive power. And anyone who has studied global warming can tell you what makes them worse. Consider also the financial consequences: Allow intelligent design into science textbooks, lecture halls, and laboratories, and the cost to the frontier of scientific discovery—the frontier that drives the economies of the future—would be incalculable. Students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel will be taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. Everything is truly divinely constructed, but divinity is not to be construed as incomprehensible to humanity.
Over time, there have been various recorded ways in which people have experienced or recognized the presence and works of God; in prayer, in meditation, in revelations and visions, through his word – the Bible and there are even those that experienced Emmanuel (God with us). The experience of God is nature's default and it's ubiquitous; it's in our circumstances and situations, in the good and the bad, in past, present and future, in our quiet alone time, in our fellowships and associations, in our conscience, and most definitely in our hardships, doubts, discoveries and quest for knowledge. God takes the initiative to reveal himself numerously, we need only heed.
30so they asked him, "what miraculous sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? Our forefathers ate the manna in the desert; as it is written; "He gave them bread from heaven to eat." …. 34"Sir,"they said, "from now on give us this bread." … 35Then Jesus declared "I am the bread of life… 36 But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe …41at this the Jews began to grumble about him because he said, "I am the bread that came down from heaven." 42 They said, "Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, "I came down from heaven?" John 6:30-59
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References:
· All Astrophysical facts are directly borrowed from:
"The Perimeter of Ignorance" by Neil deGrasse Tyson From Natural History Magazine, November 2005.
Some paragraphs have been directly quoted.
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